January 2007
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Day January 30, 2007

Entries 2 Total

Well-behaved embedded video ad

Jan 30, ’07 1:49 PM

rollover.jpg

No-one can have missed the new crop of Apple-beats-PC ads – nicely filmed, but getting a bit annoying even for Mac Addicts like me. I won’t bother with a detailed critique now: suffice to say that they’re carried by the particular humour of the comedians, and that the ads aren’t so much for the Mac as for iLife (I suppose that Apple have to flog the software angle).

Anyhoo, that’s not the point. The reason I thought of the ads again today is that – upon visiting Technorati – I see that the ad’s running embedded on the home page.

Best of all, the ad’s running silently – you need to mouse-over the ad to both enable sound and restart the clip (all of which happens seamlessly I should say).

It struck me as a sensible way to have rich media and clips operating on the home page: unobtrusively and considerately. I wouldn’t be surprised if the click-through (or rather ‘mouse over’ is higher because it’s elective – rather than the rush of people looking for ways to ‘kill’ the ad as it interrupts whatever else we were doing at the time.

Good to see such sensible developments in ad serving.

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SMS – direct from the Apple Address Book with the K800i

Jan 30, ’07 1:38 PM

A while ago I posted about a lovely little app from mobile.feisar.com that allowed me to sync my Ericsson K800i with my mac. One of the best £1.49s I’ve ever spent!

Anyway, the lovely folk there mailed me today with a new plug-in that allows – at LAST – me to SMS directly from my mac via the K800i.

In case people aren’t aware, when your mac is “paired” with a mobile phone and you’re in the Address Book application, you can right-click (or command-click, as Mac Users say) on a mobile number and select “SMS” from the contextual menu.

This allows one to knock out SMS messages as if there were no tomorrow. The only reason I miss the Hated Treo 650 is for its awesome texting capabilities, but now I feel liberated.

There’s an additional nice touch in the software that, when you get an incoming call there’s an on-screen notification and you can accept, reject or immediately SMS the caller. Best of all, at the end of a call, you’re asked if you want to log the call in the contact record:

Called at 30/01/2007 10:03

is added to the notes record. Granted, it hasn’t got duration, whether initiated or incoming, or even a billing code (!) but it’s still a neat touch. Best of all it’s simple, lightweight, needs no effort on my part and – gloriously – just £1.49.

With all of this Mac-K800i Karmic Goodness I may even be slightly sad when I trade up to the inevitable iPhone… Maybe.

UPDATE: 20070326… The other day I went to sync my phone and – erk – there was an error: apparently the plugin was no longer compatible with iSync. Of course – the curse of configuration management when you run Software Update and just install all latest updates to OSX! I wandered over to Feisar’s site and found this helpful update – typically clear and helpful. Honestly, this is such a helpful site – and even better value! This really is my favourite ever £1.49 spent online!

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