Ramblings

I’ve been a Google Voice user for a while and now you can join the ranks without an invitation.

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required. […]

I personally love the service. I have the voicemail from my iPhone forwarded to Google Voice so that all my voicemail is in one place (and I can get them as text messages). The Google Voice number is the only one I give out any more since it is trivial to screen calls, block numbers from ever calling you again, and generally masking where you are (one number can connect to many phones) at any given point.

We need more silly stuff like this slide Volkswagen built in a subway.

Both AT&T and Apple have sent out statements Wednesday acknowledging yesterday’s iPhone 4 preorder meltdown. According to AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom, preorder sales for the iPhone 4 were 10 times higher than the first day of preorders for the iPhone 3GS last summer. Apple has also publicly acknowledged that things did not go smoothly, apologizing to would-be customers who weren’t able to get an order in before the iPhone 4 sold out.

Apple said that it and its cell carriers worldwide took more than 600,000 preorders for the iPhone 4 yesterday. This was the “largest number of preorders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions,” forcing many customers to abandon their attempts to complete an order. […]

600,000 preorders in a single day! I can’t say I would blame AT&T or Apple for system failures under that scenario. They planned for the loads they saw with the last model (and then some I’m sure), but were swept under by unexpectedly large demand to the point where Apple called it quits due to production availability concerns. You can only prepare for so much demand.

SCO was dealt yet another blow in court today when District Judge Ted Stewart rejected the company’s motion requesting a new trial or judgement of law. In a ruling issued today, Judge Stewart sided with a jury that issued a verdict against SCO in April, finding that Novell was the rightful owner of the UNIX SVRX copyrights. According to Judge Stewart, SCO failed to demonstrate that the jury’s verdict contradicted the evidence presented in the case. […]

One more step towards stopping the madness. It’s about time.

But the landscape is shifting, perhaps more quickly than we might like. Mobile browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years. Two of the three dominant video game consoles have web browsers (and one of them is quite excellent). We’re designing for mice and keyboards, for T9 keypads, for handheld game controllers, for touch interfaces. In short, we’re faced with a greater number of devices, input modes, and browsers than ever before. […]

This article couldn’t have been timed much better. I was just looking into what it would take to create a basic site theme that could handle the mobile browsers without browser sniffing and server-side nonsense. I strongly believe in progressive enhancement on the Web and approaches like this where the system can adapt on the fly to your device’s capabilities.

Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites have reportedly been passing very granular user data to advertisers without informing users about it, in violation of their own privacy policies.[…]

Color me surprised. Just glad I made the decision to leave. This could still have affected me to some degree, but it cannot any more.

I’m not big into typography and I don’t usually use more than a baseline sans-serif font for my sites as a result. However, there’s been a big push in the last few months to get “real” fonts out on the web and usable by websites. Typekit and a few others have been offering services for a while now that allow you to use licensed fonts on your website. Google has now jumped into fray with a collection of completely free fonts and their own distribution method. It looks pretty simple to use. Very simple, actually. Go check it out if that’s your thing.

(Typekit is on board with it and sounds somewhat excited to see Google join in.)

Google’s long-awaited open-sourcing of the VP8 video codec has finally happened and both Mozilla and Opera are on board with it. The new codec and container combine decent quality with open source licensing and royalty freedom. Might this be enough to topple H.264 as the Web video codec of choice? […]

Glad to see Google, et. al., making strong moves to ensure that the preferred video format for the Web is open and free. It was refreshing to see Adobe even signed on and will support the codec inside Flash.

Students who were photographed at home by the Lower Merion School District IT department will have the opportunity to see the photos thanks to a court order issued Friday. The students will be able to view the images with or without their parents, and request that the court block their parents from seeing “sensitive” photos if they so choose. […]