Originally posted at the Shufflegazine Blog

The awesome people at Seesmic finally got around to launching their iPhone application last week.

I’ve been a fan of Seesmic from rather early days. To me, they edged out TweetDeck as the Desktop Twitter client to have at the time, having launched support for multiple accounts and integrating Facebook support before anyone else did. Since then I’ve moved on to Seesmic Web (I’d recommend it any day considering it doesn’t use Adobe AIR. But I digress…)

I’ll leave the app comparison for another day, but I think Seesmic’s iPhone app’s first rendition is quite good overall.

The first thing that struck me about the app was the seemingly blazing response time, both in terms of loading new information and response using the touchscreen. By this I mean that a lot of apps I use (I’m not talking just Twitter apps) are effectively hung until their update/reload is complete – this does not seem to be the case here. While I wait for the latest tweets to be updated, I can still navigate around the app freely.

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Originally posted at the Shufflegazine Blog

Even though this isn’t a psychology blog, it is always interesting to understand how we, as humans, react. And I’m referring particularly to technology. The reason for this train of thought is the hype and the reaction surrounding the release of Apple’s iPad last week.

Quite obviously, it’s hard to be upbeat about the name. I can understand Apple’s thought process – iPod, iPhone, so yeah: iPad. But they do have the iMac, so it isn’t just an i, P nomenclature.

Apple today has a unique fan following created by themselves. A set of classy, elite devices, in their own price and performance range, and a product lock, which tends to put some people off. Yet you find yourself in a publishing house, or even in management offices, and you will see over and over again, how Apple computers have found their way into the elite space. Most people that take the move towards Mac’s never look back. Apple customers may not be as large as the Microsoft customer base but they sure are way more loyal.

So what is it about Apple? Is it the classy, white/black, chic persona they give their devices? Is it the aura that comes with owning a Mac or an iPhone? Is it Steve Jobs? It’s probably a combination of all of these things and a bit more.

Last week’s release of the iPad marks another step in Apple’s revolution. Sure, there are a large number of folks were disappointed or feel that the iPad was all hype and no value. People said the same when the iPhone came out and look at it… today it has even become the choice of phone for the enterprise. Apple brought in the iPad because they felt that there was a gap between the smartphone and the laptop and iPad is a device that does combine features of both.

My points of concern? The camera. I’m really not sure how and why they didn’t put in something that obvious.

Consider, a tablet PC with video conferences, a 10in screen with 3G. It can easily become the portable device for the enterprise as well. The potential is there.

And Apple doesn’t go without putting some strong thought into their creative process. All the iPhone apps will run out of the box with the iPad. I think that was a well-thought out decision. The pricing is definitely a marker as well, considering most people expected a device of this calibre to start at $1,000.

Apple even launched their bookstore to go hand-in-hand with this. If Apple can cover a large range of books in a good range of languages – to the level that the iTunes and App store have reached today – people will adopt the iPad. Even if they’ll never want to call it that.

Originally posted at the Shufflegazine Blog

I’ve been using Google Chrome as my default browser for some time. What amazed me from the start was the sleek interface. Getting rid of the extra menu bars was, in my opinion, one of the smartest design moves on a browser. The extra screen space was phenomenal, yes every little pixel of it. There were others, such as one single box (affectionately called the omni-box) for address and search (and admin options), but it was the overall interface and screen space that really caught my eye. Speed is also something I’ve enjoyed with Chrome. I honestly can’t really tell the difference between how fast a page loads against, say, Firefox, but the speed with which Chrome as an application operates – from starting up to opening tabs – is definitely an improvement over other browsers.

Chrome, for those who don’t know it, is based on an open source project called Chromium. As part of the Chromium project, Google has made the browser available on Linux and Mac platforms in line with the Chrome releases, as a developer edition. Ofcourse this meant that while its stability was not guaranteed, test versions of the browser have been available for some time. Last week, Google finally announced the release of the beta version of Chrome for the Mac. This finally puts Chrome into contention against Safari and Firefox on the Mac. In addition, Google has unveiled a larger and constantly growing extensions gallery, to rival Firefox extensions.

The question is then, can Chrome do what it did on the PC – move into the top 3 browsers in a year? Users are already raving about its speed, but stability is something that has to be proven over time. In addition, it seems that extensions are not yet available for the Mac, something Google will have to fix soon if they want to really sway hardcore Firefox users.

One thing’s for certain, IE is nowhere in the picture.