Greenville Business Magazine 2010 June issue : Page 50
››executive lifestyle g gadgets izmos & Now you can use the GPS in your smartphone to help you lose weight. With Runkeeper installed and running on your iPhone or Android OS phone, you are inviting its GPS to keep tabs on you when you are out for your morn- ing walk (or run.) On your phone, the software monitors your progress, allowing you to listen to music or even take photos while monitoring your progress for later review. The software integrates with the runkeeper.com website, giving you a web based control panel that will allow you to see your workouts over time, share your maps and information with other like minded people, and even coordinate groups to run together. The system will let you log other fitness activities as well so you can keep a complete picture even if you are alternating between outside runs and trips to the treadmill at your local gym. The smartphone apps are free and the website offers both free and premium levels of membership with additional feature options. As I write this, it’s still national photography month and I was quite surprised at the number of people I’ve talked to who weren’t aware of Google’s free application for managing and making simple edits to digital photo- graphs. The editing I do with my photos is mostly simple stuff. I crop, fix red eye, occasionally fix color balance, and rarely sharpen. Picasa does all of that in a very simple to use interface, all the while keeping track of my grow- ing collection of photos. Friends and family like the fact that it’s simple and allows one click uploading of photos to the web with free hosting on the Google’s servers. You can post photos publicly, have them unlisted, or locked down with credentialed login required for viewing. The sync feature will automatically upload your tweaks to the website so that your contacts are always seeing the latest version of the photos. The software will make movies from your slides and videos, even allowing some simple titling. The latest version of the software will recognize faces in your photos and group them allowing you to assign them names. This will then allow you to find photo- graphs you’ve taken of a particular family member regardless of when the photo was taken. It works amazingly well, and across my tens of thousands of photos, only my identical twin brothers seem to stump its recognition engine. Getting photos into Picasa from your digital camera is quick and painless and it provides all the right options for managing the files on your camera or computer. This single free app has probably saved me more time than any other photo app ever. BY PHIL YANOV 50 GREENVILLEBUSINESSMAG.COM | JUNE 2010 Picasa Runkeeper
>>executive lifestyle - Gizmos & Gadgets
Phil Yanov
Now you can use the GPS in your smartphone to help you lose weight. With Runkeeper installed and running on your iPhone or Android OS phone, you are inviting its GPS to keep tabs on you when you are out for your morning walk (or run.) On your phone, the software monitors your progress, allowing you to listen to music or even take photos while monitoring your progress for later review. The software integrates with the runkeeper.com website, giving you a web based control panel that will allow you to see your workouts over time, share your maps and information with other like minded people, and even coordinate groups to run together. The system will let you log other fitness activities as well so you can keep a complete picture even if you are alternating between outside runs and trips to the treadmill at your local gym. The smartphone apps are free and the website offers both free and premium levels of membership with additional feature options.
As I write this, it’s still national photography month and I was quite surprised at the number of people I’ve talked to who weren’t aware of Google’s free application for managing and making simple edits to digital photographs. The editing I do with my photos is mostly simple stuff. I crop, fix red eye, occasionally fix color balance, and rarely sharpen. Picasa does all of that in a very simple to use interface, all the while keeping track of my growing collection of photos. Friends and family like the fact that it’s simple and allows one click uploading of photos to the web with free hosting on the Google’s servers. You can post photos publicly, have them unlisted, or locked down with credentialed login required for viewing. The sync feature will automatically upload your tweaks to the website so that your contacts are always seeing the latest version of the photos. The software will make movies from your slides and videos, even allowing some simple titling. The latest version of the software will recognize faces in your photos and group them allowing you to assign them names. This will then allow you to find photographs you’ve taken of a particular family member regardless of when the photo was taken. It works amazingly well, and across my tens of thousands of photos, only my identical twin brothers seem to stump its recognition engine. Getting photos into Picasa from your digital camera is quick and painless and it provides all the right options for managing the files on your camera or computer. This single free app has probably saved me more time than any other photo app ever.
The Kin is a cell phone that elicits an visceral response from anyone who sees it. It’s fun and odd in a cool way, but I’ll have to warn you that on at least one occasion, the reaction I got from a friend was chortling. Carry the kin with you to a social event and someone may think you’ve stolen the phone from a Japanese school girl. Unlike anything else I’ve ever carried, the Kin is a palm sized square screen that slides up to reveal a spiffy looking keyboard. Based on Windows, the Kin is cute, cool, very funky and frequently infuriating to use. It loads all your Twitter and Facebook friends and then displays their updates over their profile pictures as the home screen display. Snappy looking speech balloons alert you to missed calls, and although the phone will integrate with email accounts from a variety of providers, it best connects to Windows Live Hotmail. If using Hotmail it will sync contacts as well as your mail to the phone. Once configured, the Kin allows you to see every photo, call, sms text message sent by or received to the phone on the Kin Studio website. The website offers a very attractive console which shows all of the phone activity in a timeline fashion and it allows you to manage the phone and it’s pictures from there. The website also gives you the choice of sharing pictures from the phone with your facebook and social network friends from either the website of the phone itself. It really is cool, but did I mention infuriating? On a phone this small your hands always seems to touching one of the buttons and doing something you didn’t intend, and it goes beyond accidental dialing. Even when the phone is locked you can change the volume of the ringer either inadvertently sending the phone into silent mode or setting yourself up for a very loud surprise at some unexpected moment. The phone menu uses a Zune like interface with word in large letters as the buttons, but finding the option you were looking for always seemed harder than it needed to be. I think someone who loves the web interface may be willing to overlook the frustrating bits of this phone in order to have the cool factor. Let me know if that person is you.
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