Blue Chi’s

Twitter is the hottest thing on the Internet right now, yet people either do not understand, think it is silly, or are addicted to it. In Oman, Twitter is steadily gaining popularity as more people and companies join it. For those who still do not know what this is, Twitter is a service that lets you send very short messages (140 letters or less) to people who follow you. If you are on Facebook, think of it as a website dedicated to status updates, and instead of being restricted to friends you know, it is public.

The short messages of Twitter can be used in a number of ways. The most commonly understood method is to simply use it as an answer to the question “What are you doing right now?”. Your answer could be anything from “Having my famous cereal for breakfast” to “Running late for work as usual”. These are updates that enable your friends to know what you are doing at any moment.

The second function for Twitter is to use it as a chat platform. Twitter enables its users to reply to each others messages instantly using a myriad of devices. If you need a quick answer to a short question, like the location of a restaurant or an advice on something to buy, you can make an update on Twitter and get a short answer from any of your followers quickly.

The third function of Twitter is to use it as a source of real time news, whether it came from professional industries or normal people. The concept of a “Retweet”, which is the equivalent to a rebroadcast of a twitter update, makes news spread across the whole of Twitter instantly, so if you found a tweet with breaking news, you can retweet it instantly to your friends who are likely to retweet it even further down the chain.

For people like myself who are officially addicted to service (I have made more than 10,000 status updates since I registered two years ago), Twitter has become part of the lifestyle we follow. My followers know about my life more than anybody else does, and I know a lot about the lives of those who I follow in return. I have used many different methods of communication over the years, but I had never before made a connection with so many people on such a personal level like I have on Twitter. It might sound unnatural to those who don’t user the service, but I now feel that I am part of a community which I cannot abandon easily.

I have been told that I no longer have any privacy because people know every single move I make from the minute I wake up until the minute I decide to stop reading my novel in bed and go off to sleep. I have to admit that I am no longer sure about the extent to which I should disclose personal information about myself, and I do not advise anyone to tweet as much as I do, but I believe that the whole world is still trying to understand social media and it will take us a while to establish a common etiquette for using such a service. Until that happens we will have to tweet using common sense to ensure that we do not harm ourselves and those close to us by exposing too much information to the rest of the world.

The recent announcement of the iPad and the experimentation with HTML5 by YouTube and others led people argue about whether or not Flash is necessary, or even good at all, for the Internet. Apple has announced that, just like the iPhone, the iPad will not support Flash. YouTube and a number of websites have started testing the use of HTML5 video instead of Flash to playback web video.

Many people are vocally against Flash because it is a proprietary technology that is controlled by Adobe. People think the web should be built using open standards such as CSS and HTML. Images on the internet do not need a special plug to be played and are placed directly on a web page, the new HTML5 will make it possible to embed a video inside an HTML page the same way an image is placed. As Flash is the most popular method for delivering video on the internet, a lot of people seem to believe that the arrival of HTML5 will be the end of the Flash video era. A number of modern browsers such as Chrome and Safari already support the HTML5 video tag and websites such as YouTube and Vimeo started testing it for delivering video.

There are a lot of compatibility issues with HTML5 video tag and it will take a very long time (years) before it can become a serious alternative for Flash video. The HTML5 video tag enables embedding a video directly onto a web page, but there is no actual standard video format for the web and there is no consistency in the support of video codecs by browsers. The majority of video codecs are restricted by use licenses and no format is currently universally supported.

Apple refuses to have Flash on the iPhone because it fears that it will negatively affect the user experience due to its tendency to consume the system resources, however, all other smart phone platforms (Android, Palm, Windows, and Blackberry) have announced that they will support the new Flash Player 10.1 which has been developed for mobile and touch based navigation in mind. Apple also will not support Flash on its upcoming iPad tablet even though it will come with a new powerful processor that is capable of delivering a desktop like browsing experience.

Instead of waiting for Apple to reconsider its position, Adobe announced that the upcoming version of Adobe Flash Professional, CS5, will enable developers to use Flash CS5 and ActionScript 3.0, the same tools used to create Flash on the web, to create native iPhone applications. This means that Flash developers can use their existing skills and easily create smart mobile phone applications that will run on the iPhone, Android, or the desktop web, using a single SDK with very little changed between each different platform version of the same application.

It must be remembered that Adobe does not make money off the Flash Player, but by selling development tools such as Flash Professional and Photoshop. Adobe creates a number of tools, such as Dreamweaver, that work with web standards such as HTML5. The video tag is very unlikely to have any significant impact of the use of Flash for delivering video on the web anytime soon, and even if it did, it should be remembered that Flash is not just a medium for delivering video, Flash is the most popular method for creating web games and other rich interactive content. Many popular web services such as TweetDeck, Google Streetview, Picnik, are built on Flash and they don’t have anything to do with video.

The fact that the iPhone and the iPad do not support Flash is not the end of Flash, for the real customers of Adobe, the developers, Flash can still be the a good option for developing applications, especially due to the ease at which applications created using Flash can be ported to multiple platforms (including the iPhone) easily!

I have to admit that I am very excited about the recently announced Apple iPad, and just like the majority of people I am not sure if I really need one, but I just want it! I think that it is the best couch/bedside computer, it is just a device you keep at home to check your email while laying in bed or on a coach, maybe carry along when chilling at Caribou while having a cold drink…. damn that sounds cool!

I can’t say that I’m super upset about multitasking, I’ve been using the iPod Touch and iPhone for a while now and I am really not bothered about it all that much. I think that not running Flash in the browser is a drawback, but not a deal breaker for me because I don’t play web Flash games, and because YouTube has its own application.

Strangely my most favourite feature of the iPad is the new calendar, it looks really awesome and makes me think the iPad could be used as a serious office organizer, especially if you sync Google Calendar using Exchange the same way I do using the iPhone.

All of that said, I am going buy one the second it comes out, I am looking forward to read the reviews and see what the developers do with it.. and then I will seriously have to think about whether or not spending money on a coach computer is really a good idea!

I’ve only subscribed to a mobile data plan less than two months ago, but I already feel that the way I use the Internet on the go has changed forever, tharmt is of course also directly related as well to my iPhone as well, but many other smart phones like android devices. Could’ve done the same.

I spoke with several people about how the transition to a mobile data plan is similar to the transition to a mobile phone for the first time, to some people the mobility by itself does not justify the cost of the plan, but used to say why get a mobile phone when I can just go home and make a phone call, most people are not running vital businesses that require urgent instant feedback, but the same thing could be said about mobile Internet, imagine being able to do everything you do on your PC on your mobile phone, from YouTube and Facebook, to editing an excel sheet on Google Docs, and all of that in a big enough screen and running through a high speed connection. Of course the phone plays s big part of it, but it is the connectivity that makes all the difference. It is truely life changing.

So if you did get my opinion yet on whether or not you should get a data plan, even in Oman, the answer is yes of course – provided you have a good enough phone to make use of it. And just to prove my point, I made this blog post from my phone that is connected through a 3G network!

The new iPhone OS came out a couple of days ago, and for some reason, most people are talking about the really boring copy-and-paste feature which barely anybody ever uses on the go. For me personally the most significant feature of this new OS is the official support for Arabic. Not only can the iPhone now read and write Arabic text, but you can set the whole OS to use Arabic as the system language.

I use the iPhone OS 3.0 on my iPod Touch. The only major difference between the iPhone and the iPod Touch is the iPhone has a sim card and a built-in camera while the iPod Touch does not.

In order to set the system language to Arabic you have to go through Settings>General>International and from there pick Arabic as the language of the system. You can use an Arabic Keyboard without changing the system language by going through Setting>General>Keyboard Layout and check Arabic. That would let you switch the keyboard to Arabic at any time.

Once you set the Language ot Arabic the system will restart into Arabic. All the default applications, except Safari and Mail, use Arabic names:

I don’t have access to a wifi network when I was writing this, so I can’t show you how the browser works in Arabic, but I have a random Arabic email in my inbox from a random stupid girl who spams me with forwards sent to an account I use for sending website newsletters. Anyway, you can see Arabic in mail here:

(Of course I did not forward the stupid message, I’d rather go to hell).

The Arabic keyboard is very similar to the PC layout with some changes in the lower row to fit all the letters:

The coolest thing though, in my opinion, is how the music library uses the Arabic alphabet to sort the music and then follows it with English. I rewrote the name of a single song in Arabic to see how it looks like:

All the song meta data appears in Arabic during playback.

And what’s even cooler is that you can have the lyrics in Arabic as well!! Of course you would have to add these manually one by one. There are programs to do this automatically for English songs, but the program will obviously not work for Arabic songs.

Finally, you can also see Arabic meta data on Cover Flow as well:

The other significant additions in OS 3.0 for me were the landscape mode typing for all applications and spot light search everything. I found the shake to shuffle feature annoying as the songs started shuffling randomly as I walked around with my iPod in my back pocket.

I don’t write much in Arabic, but I would certainly like to read Arabic on the thing even if I don’t necessarily write much. I don’t have many Arabic songs on my iPod, but I would also like to have the meta data for these in Arabic just for the fun of it!

A lot of bloggers in Oman are starting to use Twitter these days and it was really fun having a number of people giving us live coverage of Gulf Cup matches using twitter.

One thing I noticed is that the majority of people are using the standard Twitter web portal to tweet, which is extremely bare and does not provide a lot of fuctionality, I am not sure how mny people know that there many different standalone Twitter clients that can enhance your Twitter experience.

I tried a number of clients on the PC and the iPod touch, but the one I would like to talk about today is TweetDeck. This is is a desktop client available for Windows, Mac and Linux that is built on AIR - an Adobe technology for creating desktop applications with online functionality. 

TweetDeck runs on your computer like any other application, it can be minimized to the toolbar. Whenever someone makes a tweet you will get a small IM like notification. TweetDeck has one-click URL shortening, message shortening, TwitPic upload, and friend groups. Like the majority of AIR applications, it is extremely light and has a clean UI.

TweetDeck is free, so if you are a Twitter user there is no reason for you not to give it a try. You will need to install the Adobe AIR runtime if you don’t have that already.

I have previously also tried twhirl - another AIR based desktop client, twitterfic – an application for the iPhone/iPod touch, Twitter Tools – a WordPress plug-in for making tweets (currently using this for Republic of Code twitter account), and the official Twitter Facebook application for posting my tweets as Facebook status updates.

I used the Twitter Mobile Portal in the past, but now I make most of my on-the-go tweets using SMS.

I’m not sure if anybody else uses any special Twitter clients, but Muscati seems to be using TwitterBerry on his Blackberry as you can see from the screenshot above.

vBulletin is probably the most popular online discussion board software on the Internet. On the Omani internet, it is probably the ONLY discussion board software used at all! We have recently installed version 3.8.0 at Republic of Code and I can’t really say that I like it.

First of all, the difference between 3.8.0 and 3.7.x is not major, social network features are now just more emphasised. The majority of vB new features over the last two years are just making the whole thing seriously over cluttered, there is no way to disable most of the new features and it is really annoying. vBulletin has been trying to become a blogging platform, an online gallery, a CMS, a social network, and I don’t know what else. The majority of these new stupid services are never used the majority of users.

This problem is not new, when was the last time you used the Calendar feature on your forum? When was the last time you or one of your members ever clicked on the built-in FAQ section? Why the hell do we need to have the total number of posts and threads on the side of the forum index?  And now the new “Community” link on the toolbar is just driving me crazy. (You need to log-in to see it)

I know that it is possible to remove all these features by manually editing the templates and removing the links, but that is such a hassle, especially as you might have to update your template manually afterwards each time you upgrade the script. 

If I were to start a new forum I would not pay to use vBulletin, I’m waiting patiently for bbPress to take off, but there doesn’t seem to be any progress with that project. It is such a shame.

That is not to say that there aren’t vB features which I like,  I love their AJAX implementation and how you can edit posts and thread lists on the fly. I generally like their template structure, I like the PM system, and I LOVE THE TAGGING FEATURES. I took a quick look around a number of Omani forums and it does not seem that anybody is using this feature even though it’s been introduced for a about a year now.

Tagging is the best way for organising content and making your threads link to each other in a logical way. I tag every single thread at the Flash Forum to make it easy for members to find threads with similar problems. My stats say that more and more members are clicking on these tag links and are browsing for threads that way.

I do not think that I will be changing vBulletin anytime soon, but I will surely make some many changes to the toolbar and forum index to simplify things and make sure that useless features do not contribute to the clutter.

I’m one of those people who switched to Google Chrome on the first day it came out. I still have to use Firefox about once a week to finish some Republic of Code work using a special extension that is only available for Firefox, but I’m practically using Chrome all day long.

Chrome comes with a feature called Incongnito which lets you browse the Internet without storing any information about what you do online on your machine. Many people dubbed this feature “Porn Mode” as that seemed to be its most obvious use!

But I’ve found it very helpful (for stuff other than porn) because runs in sort of a sandbox that is unconnected to your other information and cookies. This means that you can log-into two Gmail or Facebook accounts at the same time by opening an Incognito window and using it for your second account.

I have multiple Gmail accounts which I use for different things, for example, my feeds are managed through Google feedburner through my first Google account, but I use Google Analytics through another account. It’s confusing how I ended up there, but using Incognito I can stay logged in both accounts without having to log-out from one to check the other.

This is also helpful when you’re using your computer and then someone comes in saying that they want to check their email, you do not have to log-out of your account, just open an Incognito window and let them check it from there!

I’ve recently became a fan of many web shows, I stopped watching TV a while ago, but it wasn’t since I started subscribing to video podcasts a couple of months ago when I got really hooked up on several web shows. Here are some of the my favourite TV shows which I make sure I never miss an episode of:

Diggnation

Diggnation is a weekly show that talks about the most popular user submitted stories on Digg.com. I used to think that Alex Albrecht was sort of a loser, but I now think that he is really funny. I can’t miss a single episode of this show now. Shows last about 45 minutes or so. 

Tekzilla

Another show by Revision3, the same web production company that makes Diggnation, this one is a strictly technology show that features reviews, tech news, and user questions. The weekly episodes last about 45 minutes or so, a short 5 minute tip is released on daily basis.

CollegeHumor Original Videos

CollegeHumor is probably the funniest thing ever made on the internet. The videos they make are crude, offensive, vulgar, and extremely funny. This website is not for everyone and it is BLOCKED IN OMAN. Many of the CollegeHumor videos can be seen on YouTube though. News came out a couple of days ago that CollegeHumor got a deal with MTV to make proper TV shows for that network.

The Onion News Network Videos

I’m sure many of you have seen the Onion, this website looks and sounds like a newspaper website, but the whole thing is actually fake. They have CNN-esque video shows and reports which are totally insane. Again, a lot of this is offensive and not safe for work. 

Last week I also discovered Tiki Bar TV, the concept of the show is extremely stupid as the show goes on like a TV sitcom when in fact the whole point behind it is to introduce a new cocktail, but for some I reason I find it extremely entertaining. Episodes are less than 5 minutes in length and I’m not sure about the frequency of it. 

I also still regularly watch WebbAlert, but I already talked about this show last year.

Does anybody else subscribe or watch any web shows? If so what are your favourites?

Nawras Shababiah! You can visit it here.

I have no idea what happened to Nawras. They usually work with professional branding agencies, but this website about their latest new ‘thing’ is atrocious! I do not know if this was made internally in Nawras or by a cheap computer shop in Ruwi. The last month of the year 2008 starts tomorrow, but this website has every single design and usuability flaw seen in websites made in the year 1998.

For God’s sake, point me to a single decent website made in 2008 that has a Flash intro (WITH FREAKING SOUND TRACK) that plays automatically when you open the wbsite? The website looks ugly, defies all the logical rules for proper navigation, does not have a logo or a title at the top of the page, and does not even have a title tag. The Arabic version of the website has grammatical errors in the first line of the first text page and does not have a freaking full stop at the end of the first paragraph.

This is a service made by a mobile network operator and yet there is no mobile version of the page! How smart is that?

For some reason, I still think that if this website entered the Oman Web Awards it will come in the top three if not at number 1. Now how wack is that?