nptech.info

Yesterday on TWiG, Leo and Jeff and I discussed Facebook integration in Ping--Leo didn't know it was there, but looking at the screenshots on Apple's site, before I got the iTunes 10 download, I said it was there. But even though the Ping web page reads "Find even more music fans...by connecting to your Facebook [...]

The second season of my Work Smart video series at FastCompany.com premiered yesterday, with a question from Suhasini Kotcherlakota about how to take better meeting notes, and some answers from me and Brad Isaac, who wrote a great piece on mind-mapping meetings at Lifehacker a few years back. Despite the fact that I still [...]

Garrett Murray diffs iTunes 9 versus iTunes 10 user interfaces in rollover screenshots. I like how the volume slider is so much more iPhone 4ish.

Been getting harassed via telephone by some vacation telemarketing place in Las Vegas. At first I set my phone to send calls from that one number directly to voicemail. Then, tonight, I re-discovered you can block callers in Google Voce and automatically give them the official "this number is no longer in service message." Yes. [...]

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, "How can I learn how to code?" Today fluorescentinca showed me Google Code University, a collection of tutorials on Googly languages (like Python, Java and Go) for relative beginners. Some good stuff there. (I also wrote a more general Lifehacker piece last year that can [...]

Just completed my first email sweep with Gmail's new "Priority Inbox" feature enabled, and it's a keeper. Over time, if this mechanism proves to be as good as Gmail's top-notch spam filtering, it could be the reason why you only check Gmail in the browser. (Well-played, GOOG.) Priority Inbox adds an "important messages" section [...]

My greatest hope for the hotly-rumored, might-launch-any-day-now social networking app "Google Me" is that it will not merely clone Facebook in a weak attempt at parity, but that it will innovate and solve problems that plague existing social networks. Last month, a senior user experience researcher at Google, Paul Adams, gave a presentation entitled "The [...]

Thrilled to announce I'm prepping to shoot a new Q#038;A video series for Fast Company. Work Smart 2 will be a question and answer consultation with viewers and readers like you. If you've got a burning question to ask me about tech and productivity, this is your chance. Here's how it works: 1. Email me at [...]

Yesterday while I was on the air with Jeff and Leo recording TWiG, Google announced that they are halting development on Wave. The webapp will be available till the end of the year--with mechanisms to export your current wave data--and the code will remain open source. As the author of the first user guide [...]

Naming products is hard. After weeks of brainstorming, teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, trademark searching, late-night strikes of inspiration followed by crushing morning realizations that the idea sucked, I'm thrilled to announce that ThinkTank has been renamed to ThinkUp. It's our Firebird-to-Firefox moment. Rebranding is difficult, but the most heartening part of this process was that the [...]

Email, IM and the web is a huge distraction, especially for those with short attention spans. My new friend Clay Johnson uses interval training techniques to lengthen his attention span the same way he trained his body to run a marathon. Clay writes: Paying attention, for long periods of time, is a form of endurance athleticism. [...]

The muscle soreness I'm experiencing today after walking around Comic-Con all weekend made me realize: I've got to incorporate more standing and walking into my daily routine. Maybe a treadmill desk? There are some expensive desks made to fit over a treadmill (sold separately), but someone on Hacker News modified an IKEA Jerker desk [...]

I'm active on a LOT of social/sharing webapps: Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare, Tumblr, and to a lesser degree, FriendFeed, Delicious and Buzz. While most of my posts are public and open to everyone, on Foursquare and Facebook*, I only accept friend requests from people who I know and hang out with offline. Still, I feel bad [...]

Update: Google Voice product manager Craig Walker confirms that the Apps transfer is NOT supported right now, and that it was only done for a small group of testers. Sorry, all. The good news? He says there will be a way to transfer your Voice account to Google Apps once the new GApps [...]

Leo, Jeff and I jawed about the new Android App Inventor, Picnik in Picasa, mobile local search, my 23andme results, and iPhone 4 in this week's episode. My tip of the week: setting up a rich text signature in Gmail.

Copies of The Complete Guide to Google Wave have been selling like hotcakes, and unsurprisingly, the ebook has moved a lot faster than the print version. We've still got a stack of full-color, hold-in-your-hand paperback books just dying for a home, so we've got a special deal: if you buy the paperback book for $25, [...]

Jeff and Leo and I chatted about Droid X, Prince, Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and the iPhone 4 in our latest episode of TWiG. Also, listeners are helping send an Android phone into space! My tip this week: Chrome to Phone, which pushes your open Chrome tabs to your phone with the click of a button, [...]

Google Apps users who want access to all the same products that regular Google Accounts have won't have to wait much longer. An anonymous tipster tells me a Google Trusted Tester program is underway right now, which "transitions" Google Apps accounts to full access to all GOOG products, including Voice, Reader, Buzz, Analytics, and more. [...]

If you've got a Nexus One and have been patiently waiting for the OTA update to Android 2.2, this week's your week. Google says you'll get a notification by the end of the week for the update to 2.2. My sources tell me you'll get it even if you manually installed Froyo, as the [...]

Spent several hours running around town doing tedious errands the other day in neighborhoods I don't know well, so I was thrilled to finally tap the "Navigate To-Home" button on my GPS when I was done. It got me wondering: what are the software buttons you just can't help but love to tap, click, or [...]