Author: yuval

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General

DoubleTwist not living up to promise

DVD Jon is a great guy to some, evil to others. Responsible for cracking DVD DRM schemes right and left, he decided to pursue new challenges and is now leading development on a Mac-only application called doubleTwist (sic) that aims to seamlessly transfer files, encode and transcode, from your Mac to virtually any device. Great idea, especially to owners of Nokia devices burdened with dreadful software to support the phones. While Nokia’s software on the Mac is far better than the bulk and heft on the PC, it is far from great and hence I was eager to try double Twist.

doubleTwist looks nice and simple; very much like iPhoto and without the clutter and noise of iTunes. It tries to incorporate social features which I had a problem understanding their use. Probably sharing media sometime in the future, maybe file sharing – who knows?

My test was pretty demanding: transfer a video to my N95-8GB phone. It failed. Twice. I was using a MP4 AVI file and well, it told me it was done but nothing really happened. The phone was initially not detected by doubleTwist (it was by the Mac) but reading a support forum posting I changed the connection type on my device to Mass Storage which fixed that issue. Still, no files were transferred.

Another test was connecting it to my PSP. Again, same video file (that works fine on the Mac and on a PC) – and again doubleTwist appears to be doing something but in fact nothing really happened.

Both devices are on the product’s website as fully supported (N95 is a Symbian S60 Series 3 phone; PSP is there outright).

I hope it improves sometime in the future – premise is interesting – but for now, a fail.

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Categories
Shopping

Verizon VoiceWing is dead

I was one of the early adopter, I think, of Voice over IP, jumping on the Vonage bandwagon shortly after it launched in 2001. I switched away from Vonage because call quality was bad (not on Comcast…), faxes did not go through and customer service was a mockery based somewhere in India.
With all the legal battles that Vonage was facing, I jumped ship to the company that actually owned many of the patents it was infringing upon, Verizon. Their service, VoiceWing, had its weaknesses but call quality was very good, prices were low and customer service was based out of the US of A.
Today, Verizon apparently threw the towel and gave up on this service which it never really cared to promote.
It’s sad. But sadder and lamer is the fact that Verizon is giving me a mere two months to switch away. They are shutting down March 31st. Dumping on the loyal customers. What’s new?

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Categories
Computing

Microsoft Live Messenger hates my webcam and why Microsoft is the same old story

I tried using Microsoft Live Messenger, the heir to the MSN Messenger legacy. MSN Messenger was a serviceable option for people who did not have Skype. I tried using Live Messenger today with my mom who lives in Israel.

To my surprise, when I tried to connect and use my trusted Logitech Quickcam Pro webcam, which worked for the better of 3 years and does so faithfully with Skype day in and day out, I was told by Live Messenger that I did not have a webcam or audio devices. Welcome to 2009, but no audio? Guess what, it all still works with Skype and worse off, even with the long in the tooth Windows Messenger.

Looking at Yahoo! Answers for some direction, I found out that the accepted answer was, well, ‘there’s no answer and something is wrong’. Windows Live being Microsoft’s moniker for the startup way and the new spirit reinvigorating the giant software company, I went to the development team’s blog. Maybe I could post my issue there, at least as a comment. Sadly, Microsoft continues to disappoint. The comments a post about a new feature about ‘3D emoticons’ all talk about problems and issues with Live Messenger. Any responses? no. How many comments? Look at the image below. Why would I share my comment with them? Do they care?

live-comments

It is disheartening that new features, as crucial as 3D emoticons is, take precedence over the meat and potatoes of instant messaging, like audio and video chat. If Microsoft is looking to change, become more accessible, more like a startup or worse, like Google, they should LISTEN. The worst evidence of their deaf ears is the URL of the blog: “MessengerSays.spaces.live.com”. They say, we listen.

Microsoft needs a conversation. Not a monologue. They have the resources, to listen to people’s comments. We want their products to work and comments on a blog show the best example of them caring back about us. Until then, Messenger is uninstalled.

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