Nitin Khanna

I was once described as a philosopher programmer. I think I'd like to describe myself as a lifelong student.

iPhone 5 – conflict

Every year, when the new iOS comes around, major Cydia tweak hosting provider BigBoss provides a severe warning to all its users. This message, carried across all of Cydia, is an important reminder to noobs that they shouldn’t upgrade to the latest iOS before it gets jailbroken in order to preserve their tweaks. However, this time around, it seems that the warning comes with added weight –

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Year of Social

The season is changing and here, in Boulder, Colorado, it means colder nights and shorter days. It’s time for animals to wrap up their food gathering operations and finish working on cozy homes for the all too familiar winter.

 

This hibernation is also coming to a very important aspect of my life. Last year, at about the same time, I dumped Facebook in favor of Twitter. I had been inactive on the micro blog since long and returned to it, only to discover so many new and amazing connections and services. I found people worth talking to and got help where I needed it. I also posted a lot on this blog here, taking it through many iterations, themes and (free) hosting providers. Now I’ve moved it to a paid provider – NearlyFreeSpeech in order to maintain a better uptime ratio.

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The thing about Shoes.

Today, after I came back from office, I took out my wallet and keys and kept them on the side table. Then, as I was about to take off my shoes, I realized something – I realized the value of wearing shoes. You see, whenever we have a long or an important task ahead of us, we get ready. If it is a mental task like an interview or an exam, we cool our minds and prepare for the next few hours. When we are going for a trek or for camping, we pack the right gear and wear the right kind of boots. Yes, boots.

I realized that to me, wearing shoes means that I am ready for action. Many people in my family and even in my friends often tell me that my practice of wearing shoes in the house long after the day has ended, is kind of irritating. Well, I got this habit from my Dad and as I come to think of it, he is also always prepared for action. 🙂

Being prepared for anything is always important. It is not necessary to wear shoes in your sleep, but mentally, your shoes should always be on and ready for action, because in life, preparation could mean survival.

An iPhone 5 video

Here’s an article I found on iClarified that shows the iPhone 5 being compared to a puny 4S and then being booted up. The metallic sides of the phone have given way to a more subtle look and the audio port has been moved to the bottom of the phone.

Interesting… 🙂

Here’s the actual video…
http://youtu.be/kaVzt-_zajE

Of late, I’ve noticed that Gawker is too much of a tongue in cheek blog. Most of their headlines are scathing, almost as if they’re doing so to get more hits on the site. First they criticized App.net and called it snobbish and a waste of money and now they published a headline about Obama on Reddit that sounded like they got paid by the anti-Obama camp to do the headline. I don’t understand why they’re doing it and if it’s succeeding, but this gold-digging behavior on Gawker’s part does not bode well for the website. No one wants to keep listening to the lone rants of an angry man (both articles are by Adrian Chen) and we as netizens would much rather look at brighter sides of the stories than concentrate on the first bad thing that comes to mind.

App Review: Prismatic

First of all, this is a dual review – the Prismatic web and iOS apps. Secondly, I’d like to start by saying that both apps are awesome! You can pretty much stop here if you want to and go download Prismatic for iOS or go to http://getprismatic.com/ to sign up.

What makes me talk about Prismatic with so much confidence and what the heck is it?

Prismatic is a news reader app. It’s in the line with Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse and a hundred others. But what makes the iOS app so amazing is that it’s optimized for speed. The company took a lot of time (literally) to build an iOS app that matches the awesomeness of it’s web app. They built everything from scratch so much so that even Apple sent them a letter saying that it’s Engineers are looking into how an app can be designed so well.

I am definitely keeping the app on my iPhone and also as a favorite web page. But I’ve got a beef with the app makers.

1. Why concentrate on only things you find in my social networks? When we first sign up, we have the option of connecting our social networks so that the app can monitor our likes and allow us to choose which ones it’ll be displaying to us. But this is not adequate. I read a lot of news and I hate it when my apps display duplicate news items. This app, in all it’s glory, still duplicates most of the news I read because it just finds my preferences through my social networks. Instead, I’d prefer if the app extrapolated from those preferences and worked to get related news to me.

2. The web app and the iOS one both have a serious deficiency of “read later” or bookmarking services. Given that most news articles of value are longer than a couple of lines and it takes the average reader a lot longer to read it, a read later service is a must for news apps.

I hope the team at Prismatic understands the above problems and fixes them. It’s a great app and I’d love to continue using it. BTW, if you’ve read about this app elsewhere, you’ve read people calling it a Google Reader killer. Is it? No, it’s not.

App Review: Everyday.me

Whenever a trend comes to the social network scene, it comes with a flood of apps and services that do the exact same thing. I recently signed up for a service called TimeHop. It’s a neat service that emails you every day with details of posts that you made on your various social networks exactly a year ago.

 

Everyday.me is an iOS app that connects to your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts and basically records everything you post online every day. Also, the service sends you emails every few days reminding you of things you did a few years ago. Sounds familiar? Yep, TimeHop does pretty much the same thing. What’s the difference? Well, Everyday.me collects all that information that you post daily and saves it ON THEIR SERVERS. Awesome way to have your data protected isn’t it?

 

Anyways, Coming to the most important part of this blog post, Am I keeping this app? Points –

1. Beautiful UI

2. You can see all you do in a stream, from across all your social networks.

3. You can tag your  posts for your own reference since all of it is totally private

4. All your data that’s kept on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram will now also be stored on their servers.

 

So? Am I keeping it? No. It’s out of my phone. Sorry guys!