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ZumoDrive – Cloud storage for iPhone and Computers

There are several applications out there that sync files and folders between your systems, allow you to share them with friends and be used as a backup. I have reviewed one such service called Dropbox. There is a new application that provides all these features and wins by providing few extra goodies that you haven’t seen in any other application before. It’s called ZumoDrive.

ZumoDrive is basically a “cloud storage” solution that allows you to take your files, music and photos wherever you go. ZumoDrive installs a new virtual drive on your system where you can just drag and drop the files to store them in the cloud. But the part where it excels over the competition is that it doesn’t store all the data on your system. If you have used sync services before, you know that all the files that you sync are copied to every system you sync with. It is useful but wastes lot of space on each system. What if you don’t have enough space on one of your systems to sync all the files but want to access few of them ?

ZumoDrive addresses this problem by storing only few recently accessed / frequently accessed files on your local storage. All the files that you store on ZumoDrive are still accessible though they are not stored locally. When you try to access a file that is not stored locally, it streams the file to your system and from then on, it will be stored locally.

You can set how much of disk space you want to use for ZumoDrive on each of your systems. ZumoDrive uses this space to cache those files that you use most. If you are running out of storage space on one of your systems, reduce the amount of caching. If you want to access the files fast on any other system and have enough space, you can always store all the files locally.

You can share the files in your ZumoDrive with friends and it serves as a cloud backup for all the files.

Another very important use for ZumoDrive is the mobile version. There is an iPhone app (application for other mobile phones are coming soon) that you can use to access all your files. This opens up several usage scenarios. If you have an 8GB or 16GB iPhone and can’t store all of your photos / music on it, store them on ZumoDrive and access them on the fly. This makes the amount of storage available on iPhone irrelevant.

This application went public recently and I think it has a lot of potential. Test drive it today for free. It provides 1GB free space and you can always buy extra storage if you need.

Springnote – Online notebook with iPhone app

If you have an iPhone and looking for an online notebook application that has an iPhone app, check Springnote.

On the web, Springnote is an extremely easy and useful notebook application. You can create pages, share and work with friends together. There are two kinds of notebooks that you can create inside your account – Personal and Group Notebooks. I think you can understand the difference between these types by their names. You can always change the type of the notebook from the settings.

Springnote is a great way to create notebooks for ideas, interests, multimedia, projects, and documents. It provides a separate viewing mode for the readers and the readers can search, leave comments or subscribe to the changes using their RSS reader.

When you are creating pages, Springnote provides many templates that you can use to start with. Apart from the rich text editing, you can add images, video and files to pages. You can import your existing files to create pages. Sharing or collaborating is very easy. You can add important pages to your watch-list.

Dashboard shows the recently updated notebooks with more details, provides easy access to all your personal / group notebooks and provides visibility to the watch-list. Pages can be arranged in tree structure – all pages act as folders and can contain sub-pages. Add tags to your pages to easily categorize and find them. Page history shows all the changes to your notebooks and you can revert to previous versions. Last but not least, you can backup your notebooks by exporting them as HTML files to save on your system.

On the iPhone, you can download the Springnote app for free from the AppStore and get access to all your notes on the move. All pages are automatically cached when you view them and hence are available for offline viewing for subsequent use. You can take pictures and add them to your notes. iPhone app uses marked down syntax if you try to edit notebooks on the iPhone.

Get podcasts on iPhone without iTunes sync

Listening to podcasts on iPhone in the Apple’s way is too cumbersome. You have to subscribe to your favorite podcasts in iTunes on your system and you can’t subscribe to podcasts on your iPhone. Once subscribed, iTunes will check for new episodes and you have to sync your iPhone to get those new episodes on to your phone. Of course, you can get new episodes for your podcasts on your iPhone but to do that you have to switch from iPod app to iTunes app on your iPhone. So, you have to switch between these two apps to access your podcast list and new episodes. And there is one more caveat. You can’t download episodes that are over 10MB on your iPhone. For episodes that are over 10MB, you have to sync to iTunes.

And the solution for this problem is a third-party app called ‘FeedReader’. Once you download this app, you can subscribe to your favorite podcasts in RSS or Atom format and listen or watch the audio/video podcasts embedded in the feed. The only difficult part here is that you have to find the non-iTunes link to your podcast in RSS or Atom format. Search in Google and you will find RSS or Atom feed URLs for most iTunes podcasts.

You can either stream the media in your podcasts over the air or download them for offline viewing. And there is no size restriction. If you have a nice 3G coverage, you can listen to all your podcasts over the air and never worry about syncing with iTunes.

Third time lucky with Windows Live Writer

I tried on two separate occasions to use Windows Live Writer (Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose blog posts) to post to my blog and was greeted with error messages. It worked for me the third time. In fact, I have composed my previous post and this in Windows Live Writer to post to my Blogger blog.

Windows Live Writer has lots of features that help make the blogging experience better. The first point is that it enables true WYSIWYG blog authoring. You can now write your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it. You can switch between ‘Edit’ and ‘Preview’ panes to compose and see how it looks when the post is published.

Windows Live Writer has the ability to publish photos and maps easily. And it has an SDK so that developers can extend the functionality. There are several useful extensions already available for download.

Windows Live Writer is compatible with Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Windows Live Spaces and several others. While composing, you have the option to save the draft locally or as a draft on your blog platform. Inserting videos, photos, tables, maps and hyperlinks is very easy and you can use a feature called ‘Auto Linking’ to convert a specific word into a link automatically. Auto Linking is very useful if you want to link to your own posts or favorite sites every time you use a related word.

VLC Media Player – One media player to play everything

VLC Media Player is a multimedia player for various audio and video formats. It supports DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. There are several media players out there that support a subset of all the audio and video formats. So, you had to keep your Windows Media Player to play .wma and .wmv files, RealPlayer to play .ra and .rm files and then there is QuickTime to play .m4a and .mov files. Isn’t it nice to just keep one media player that plays all kinds of media ?

VLC Media Player is that one stop solution for a media player that supports all formats (it’s support for real audio and video formats is partial). And then there is RealPlayer that also supports all media types. But the problem with RealPlayer is that it is just a crappy audio player that tries to take over your computer, make itself the default player for all media and serve up ads and updates that you don’t want. On contrast, VLC Media Player is free, open-source and cross-platform.

VLC Media Player supports a large number of multimedia formats without the need for additional codecs and features a complete streaming server with extended features such as video on demand and on the fly transcoding. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. VLC works on many platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Solaris, Familiar Linux, Yopy/Linupy and QNX.

And then the fight started ...

Here is a good one from my mailbox ...

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My wife sat down on the couch next to me as I was flipping channels.

She asked, 'What's on TV?'

I said, 'Dust.'

And then the fight started ...

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My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary.
She said, 'I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds.'

I bought her a weighing scale.

And then the fight started ...

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When I got home last night, my wife demanded that I take her someplace expensive...

So, I took her to a gas station.

And then the fight started ...

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My wife and I were sitting at a table at her high school reunion, and my wife kept staring at a drunken man swigging his drink as he sat alone at a nearby table.

I asked my wife, 'Do you know him?'

'Yes,' She sighed, 'He's my old boyfriend. I understand he took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear he hasn't been sober since.'

'My God!' I said to my wife, 'who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?'

And then the fight started ...

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I took my wife to a restaurant. The waiter, for some reason, took my order first.

"I'll have the strip steak, medium rare, please."

He said, "Aren't you worried about the mad cow?"

"Naaah, she can order for herself."

And then the fight started ...

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A woman is standing & looking in the bedroom mirror.
She is not happy with what she sees and says to her husband, 'I feel horrible; I look old, fat and ugly. I really need you to pay me a compliment.'

The husband replies, 'Your eyesight's damn near perfect.'

And then the fight started ...

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I tried to talk my wife into buying a case of Miller Light for $14.95.

Instead, she bought a jar of cold cream for $7.95.

I told her the beer would make her look better at night than the cold cream.

And then the fight started ...

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I asked my wife, "Where do you want to go for our anniversary?"

It warmed my heart to see her face melt in sweet appreciation.
"Somewhere I haven't been in a long time!" she said.

So I suggested, "How about the kitchen?"

And that's when the fight started ...

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When our lawn mower broke and wouldn't run, my wife kept hinting to me that I should get it fixed. But, somehow I always had something else to take care of first: the truck, the car, e-mail, fishing, always something more important to me.

Finally she thought of a clever way to make her point.

When I arrived home one day, I found her seated in the tall grass, busily snipping away with a tiny pair of sewing scissors.

I watched silently for a short time and then went into the house. I was gone only a few minutes. When I came out again I handed her a toothbrush.

'When you finish cutting the grass,' I said, 'you might as well sweep the driveway.'

And then the fight started ...

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Hope you had a nice laugh :-)

iPhone's lack of physical keyboard is not an issue

iPhone is often criticized for the lack of a real or physical keyboard. After using the iPhone for about a month I really feel that the issue is just overblown. iPhone's lack of physical keyboard is not the real issue. The real issue is getting used to the touch keyboard provided. It takes sometime and is not all that easy for those who are used to the physical keyboards on BlackBerry phones. But believe me, it really is better than the physical one.

I have used the iPhone's keyboard to send emails and do other stuff for the past one month and I have never felt the need for a real keyboard. It just takes some getting used to. If you really feel the need, there are few apps available in the App Store that let you practice typing. Use them and you should be fine in a day.

There are many advantages of software only keyboard that iPhone provides. Depending on the context of text entry, the buttons on the keyboard can be changed. For example, when you are using the iPhone's keyboard to enter a URL in the browser's address bar, you will see a button to enter the text '.com' directly. As most of the website URLs end with the text '.com', it really reduces the typing. Do you really get such flexibility with a real keyboard ?

Another example is when you are trying to select an item from the drop-down select box on a website. iPhone shows the items in a scroller with large text that makes it easy to scroll through the list and make a selection. There are several such cases in which the software keyboard changes with context to reduce the typing needed.

And finally, it never makes sense to me to waste the space on your phone by placing a keyboard that you will not always use. In my opinion, having physical keyboard either reduces the screen size or increases the overall weight/bulkiness of the phone.

iPhone vs iPod Touch

Having used both iPhone and iPod Touch, I will specify here the key factors that you want to consider when you want to get one of these devices.

The features that you miss out in iPod Touch when compared to iPhone :

1. 3G Data : Though iPod Touch is equipped with WiFi, it is not very useful when you are not at home or a location with free WiFi. If you are on the move, you can't access data services and hence many applications that come with it are useless. Mail, YouTube and iTunes are few apps that require data connection, if you want to use them all the time. There are many applications on the App Store that use data service to work and you will miss all that fun.

2. GPS : If you want to use Google Maps on the move or those apps on the App Store that use GPS to give you information, you are out of luck. iPod Touch tries to locate you approximate position using WiFi and it works only in large cities.

3. Camera : Though iPhone's camera is not for serious photos, it will be useful for all those moments when you don't have your camera handy.

4. Wall Charger : iPhone comes with a wall charger and you can always purchase the same for iPod separately. But who wants to spend more on an already pricey device ?

5. One Gadget : If you have iPhone, you have one device that acts as a phone, plays music and takes photos. Carrying three separate devices for these actions all the time is a pain.

Let's now compare what you pay for these devices. iPod Touch is costlier than the iPhone. AT&T subsidizes iPhone and hence you pay less. You will pay full price for iPod Touch and it costs more than the subsidized iPhone. But you will pay $30 more every month to AT&T for data services.

On the other front, iPod Touch comes with more internal memory and is more slim and lightweight than iPhone.