Today is the last day in My Oovoo Day, which might more accurately been named My Oovoo Couple of Weeks. What is Oovoo? Does the post office deliver mail on My Oovoo Day?
Oovoo is a new video chatting application that is available for Mac and Windows. It allows up to 6 people to have a video chat at the same time in a display that has been compared (by people like me who watched too much TV in their formative years) to the opening credits of Brady Bunch or the grid for Hollywood Squares.
My Oovoo Day was a cleaver marketing strategy to get promotional buzz for the software. The organizers of My Oovoo Day gathered a number of popular bloggers and podcasters and arranged for them to hold a series of chats. You could then sign up for one of up to 5 slots for each chat. As expected the bloggers and podcasters promoted the day. I signed up to chat with John Wall of Marketing Over Coffee, CC Chapman from Managing the Grey (and Accident Hash) and Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation. Because of problems with the My Oovoo Day event, I was only able to get into the chat with John Wall (the email confirmation apparently got eaten by my spam filter and you could neither cancel a registration nor register again to chat with the same person) but these were independent of the Oovoo software.
The event itself was interesting. I had not chatted with John before. The software was still pretty green. I was using a Mac and had to do an update to a new version on the day of the even before anyone could hear me. I crashed at least once so this still seems like Beta software. The audio worked well. The video did not keep up but that seemed to depend on the bandwidth of each user.
Bottom line, Oovoo is worth looking at for a small group video chat. The idea of doing an event like My Ooovoo Day is also worth looking at as a model of how to promote a new product, but… it would be better to wait until the product was a little more ready for prime time.
When I first heard about the MacBook Air my impression was that it was a cool machine targeting road warriors (frequent business travelers) and that it was probably not the right laptop for me. After all, I create audio and video podcasts that would eat an 80 Gb hard drive like a fat kid eat cake. Yes the styling is gorgeous but it does not have an ethernet port (not sure when I last used that) or firewire port.
When I saw the MacBook Air at around 11 am I must admit I was impressed. “Still not the machine for me” I thought, but hey that keyboard does have a very good feel. i hope they release the support for gestures for use on my 15 inch MacBook Pro.
But now it is after 3pm and I have carried my MacBook Pro around the city last night on the 3+ mile hike from Moscone center to the Geek Brief meetup by the Fisherman’s wharf. I also have carried it around all day at MacWorld. Nothing like a sore back to make you see the advantage of a lighter machine. Will they sell any? I think so. Will there orders go up at the end of a long day at MacWorld? I think so.
Other things that I liked that I saw:
1Password was having a 50% off show special ($15) which was enough incentive to get me to buy their software that let’s you manage all your password/wallet information in an easy secure way.
Ubercaster is a podcasting platform that anyone podcasting on a Mac should at least take a look at. It is targeted towards people who do live shows.
The new version of TypeItForMe will include auto correction as well as more complex interactive templates. It would definitely be an upgrade that I would think about buying but since I bought within the last 18 months I will get it for free.
I talked to the developer of Call Recorder which I swear by for recording Skype calls/interviews. I learned that the version I already have has the ability to put in a sort of chapter marker.
Whoever at Microsoft had the idea of creating a blogger’s lounge is brilliant. Thanks for the chocolate, the ice tea and the hospitality.
If like me, you have become addicted to Twitter, then you should check out the TwitterPod application for the Mac.
If you have been living in a cave, twitter is a web based server that allows people to “micro blog”. You can enter any text that will fit in a 140 character limit. Twitter updates (or tweets) can also be delivered to your cell phone if you so desire. People twitter about blog articles they have written, what they have had for breakfast or words of wisdom as long as it fits in 140 characters. Many podcasters and bloggers have started to use twitter because you can send updates to a set of people who follow you but follow the updates, potentially, of a completely different set of people. I (my podcast is the Amateur Traveler) twitter at chris2x.
The best twitter updates I received (or wrote) the day before I wrote this article (which orriginally appeared on MacCast.com:
acedtect Happy Arbitrary Roman-derived change of annual enumeration. leolaporte Turkish coffee and a flight to Aswan where we meet the Sun Boat IV. Sarkozy and Blair are in town, snarling the traffic. chris2x just a thought, when Clark Kent gets new frames, does anyone recognize him? scottsimpson For the record, a certain part of my anatomy has also been compared to a baby’s arm: my arm. hotdogsladies GoDaddy’s checkout is like a hallway of Marines trying to hit you with a sock full of pennies. “Ow! Quit it! Don’t need ‘WebSite Tonight!!’” CaliLewis “When we honor the potato, we honor ourselves.” Just heard it on NPR. Ihnatko The fonts I bought from Comicraft for $20.08 each (with one freebie plus a $16 discount…details in post): http://tinyurl.com/3d36aq
And if those literary gems make you more interested in Twitter than as a Mac user one program that I would recommend is TwitterPod which has a clean interface and growl notification. It also highlights the last post you read (you can read URLs posted in a pop out panel) so it makes it easy to tell what posts are new.
I attended a class by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue on the new features in Leopard recently. Mr. Pogue is a dynamic speaker and the enthusiastic crowd was rocking. No, really, I mean the room was literally rocking. Of course the room was located on Holland America’s ms Volendam so the rocking was fairly easy to explain. This class was part of Insight Cruise’s (formerly Geek Cruises) MacMania 7 cruise.
A MacMania cruise is like a Mac conference at sea and more than one of the attendees had their attendance at conference paid for by their company (although only the most generous company will also pay for the cruise itself). The speakers on MacMania 7 were: Richard Dreyfuss (the actor), Janet Hill, David Pogue, Randal Schwartz, Jason Snell, Sal Soghoian, Derrick Story and Robin Williams (the Mac author not the actor). One of the wonderful perks of the cruise is being able to meet, talk with and generally shmooze with people who are well known in the Mac community.
The classes offered on MacMania 7 included:
Introduction to Lightroom
Introduction to Aperture
iPhone: The Missing Manual
Maximizing iPhoto
Photoshop for Photographers
Integrating Photoshop with Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto
Which Is Best for You — Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto?
iDVD and iMovie
Apple’s Latest and Greatest
The Ground Floor Guide to the Macintosh
Extreme Googling
Inside Mac OS X “Leopard”
Leopard Power User Tips
Introduction to iLife
Pushing iLife to the Limit
Amazingly Cool Utilities
Personal Podcasting Primer
The classes are not held while the ship is in port so that attendees and speakers alike can enjoy shore excursions or just generally explore. MacMania 7 stopped at a prvate island in the Bahamas, Aruba, Curaçao, Panama and Costa Rica with the highlight of the cruise being the Panama Canal.
The cruise had more than 4 days spent entirely at sea. If you enjoy the normal ways to spend your time on a cruise: shuffleboard, bingo, art auctions, shopping, etc then a geek cruise may not be right for you. If you can’t imagine entertaining yourself on a 10 day cruise and think that spending the time with 150 other Mac fanatics would be fun, then you might want to look into MacMania 8.
Today is the last day in My Oovoo Day, which might more accurately been named My Oovoo Couple of Weeks. What is Oovoo? Does the post office deliver mail on My Oovoo Day?
When I first heard about the MacBook Air my impression was that it was a cool machine targeting road warriors (frequent business travelers) and that it was probably not the right laptop for me. After all, I create 
