Following is a screenshot of my laptop at home (no kidding !!) and as you can see, there are only 5 icons in the Windows 7 desktop. How neat … In fact, my computer at work has the same desktop view.

This post is about how I organize my files to declutter the desktop, but more importantly, how to make it work around the Dropbox service (and any other cloud storage services or your private Internet accessible NAS). That basically makes all your important files accessible from Internet, whenever you want, and whereever you are.

Before we start the work, you need to answer yourself one question, that is “how many ways you want to access your files ?”. In my case, I have computers at work, at home and of course mobile devices like smartphone and tablet. Therefore, I can classify all the files I ever created into the following categories, in terms of access methods:

1. I want to access files created from my home computer;
2. I want to access files created from my office computer;
3. I want to access files created from my mobile devices

If I further elaborate those access methods, I have a combination of:

A) Files and folders created by home computer,

i) access from home computer only;

ii) access from any computers;

B) Files and folders created by office computer,

i) access from office computer only;

ii) access from any computers;

C) Files and folders created by any computer,

i) access only from locally;

ii) access from any computer;

As you can see A (i), B(i) essentially are the same as C(i) in the cases of home and office computer, so in principle the access method of files and folders are:

1. Files created by any computer but access only locally; (i.e. the computer that created the files)
2. Files created by home computer and accessible by other computers;
3. Files created by office computer and accessible by other computers, and;
4. Files created anywhere, but accessible by other computers.

To make the above works, all I need is to create 4 folders, of which 3 of them are created in Dropbox. And they are:

1. A folder names – “Desktop – Local“, this is a folder in each computer and stores the local created files / folders and will not share to any other computer and the Dropbox;
2. A shortcut to a folder names – “Desktop – Home“. The folder is created in Dropbox. Files / folders that created by home computer but like to share with other computer shall store here;
3. A shortcut to a folder names – “Desktop – Office“. The folder is created in Dropbox. Files / folders that created by office computer but like to share with other computer shall store here;
4. A shortcut to a folder names – “Desktop – Virtual“. The folder is created in Dropbox. Files / folders that created by any computer but like to share with other computer shall store here.

Lastly, don’t forget to install the Dropbox software to your computer to synchronize all these folders. In summary, with this approach, I minimize all sorts of files and folders in all my computers. In addition, any files and folders that need to be shared are nicely organized and stored in the Cloud storage Dropbox.com and I can easily distinguish where the files are created (home computer or work computer – for personal or work files).

Hope you will find it useful !!

I started the annual reporting of this tiny blog since 2009, and I found it is a very good way to tell how the blog compare to previous year. The first thing I found is I blogged a lot less in year 2011, in fact I posted only half as many posts as in year 2010. And therefore, the blog also sold only 76 various models of Kindles (33% less compare to previous year).

As usual, people bought many other stuff from Amazon thru the site, for examples:

• Running shoe
• Camcorder
• Zoom lens
• Laptops from Dell and Acer

However, the most funny products sold in the last 12 months, definitely belonged to that pair of Freudian slipper and naked coconut water …

Same time next year, another annual report is waiting for you.

How many apps you have downloaded to your iOS devices ? And is it easy to find them from within the devices – then run your favorite game or utility apps, move them or delete them ? Yes I know many of you have your favorite apps in the home screen and you can organize the apps into folders as well … but more questions pop up – how to name the folders ? How to arrange the folders ? And is it easy to find the folders you created last week or month in your iPhone / iPad ?

iPhone and iPad are smart devices but you need to be very smart as well one way or the other, to make that device works for you. Other than downloading good apps, I firmly believe you also need a smart(er) way to organize your apps and folders – and in turn, better user experience.

And here are 8 tips and tricks on that:

1. First, only download the apps your need. A simple but important trick, for example, if you don’t play games at all then why download the Angry Birds ?
2. Second, organize all standard Apple apps (Clock, Calendar, Contact, Map etc.) in the home screen of the device. With this approach, when you know you need to run those standard Apple apps, just go to the home screen to find it. Free up your mind, you don’t need to memorize where are those apps – like, where is the Map apps ? However, if there are really some Apple standard apps you don’t need in the home screen – save those into a separate folder, say “Apple apps”.
3. Always leave a row in the home screen for your apps and folders though, in other words, only keep at most 12 standard Apple apps in the home screen (in the case of iPhone). That will leave you 4 ”slots” to place your own apps or folders. For iPad, keep 15 standard Apple apps in the home screen and leave 5 “slots” for the apps folders.
4. In the case of iPad, you can also move one of your favorite apps to the apps docking bar in the bottom of the screen. In my case, I added Zite to it.
5. In the home screen, keep the most used apps on the left most column (if you are a right-handed person), or the right most column. That will help you to access your favorite apps with only one hand and your thumb.
6. Probably the most important tips – sort your folders position by their names. For example, place the folder sequence like “Finance”, then “Games”, then “Health” etc. That will help you easy to find one folder just by a glance to the screen. In other words, if you want to find the folder ”Health”, the first glance of the screen you found “Finance” and you will certainly know the ”Health” folder is somewhere on the right or below the folder “Finance”. No more folder hunting.
7. Keep the folders names the same between iPhone and iPad. So you can easily find the same apps in the same folder.
8. Lastly, review the apps and folders once every few months – remove the apps that no longer needed; rename the folders or create new ones if new needs arose; reorganize the folder position again.

I hope all these tips and tricks make sense to you, following you can find few screen shots of my iPhone and iPad set up.

Guess you know all about the new Kindles from the search engines, technical blogs etc. But what you probably don’t know are the impacts to you – if you’re a Kindle 2 / 3 owners, iPad owners or not living in USA. OK, here you go:

Your Kindle 3 is now named Kindle Keyboard or Kindle Keyboard 3G. The new prices are US$ 99 and US$ 139 (with sponsored screensavers) … but they are still selling at US$ 139, and US$ 189 for non-USA customers.

The Kindle 4 is now just called Kindle. This is a basically keyboard-less Kindle 3 but with only 2G of RAM (Kindle Keyboard has 4G RAM). It costs only US$ 79, but US$ 109 for non-USA customers. It’s also 30% lighter, 18% smaller and supports WiFi only. It supports six languages now – English (US and UK), German, French, Spanish, Italian, or Brazilian Portuguese. Since the Kindle now doesn’t have a physical keyboard (and the next / previous page buttons are very “low profile”), but at the same time it is not a device with touch screen – you need to use the non-QWERTY virtual keyboard and use direction keys to “type”.

And what about the new Kindle Touch ? 

The Kindle Touch is 8% lighter, 11% smaller than Kindle 3 and of course with a 6″ touch screen to turn pages (it’s called “EasyReach”). There are also one new feature – X-Ray. According to Amazon, this feature “Explores the bones of a book. With a single tap, see all the passages across a book that mention ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places or topics of interest, as well as more detailed descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari.” Yes, don’t really know what it is … I think we have to see it to believe it.

Another significant feature is the new Kindle Touch now support the display of non-Latin characters, including Cyrillic (such as Russian), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Korean characters, in addition to Latin and Greek scripts.

The Touch has a Wi-Fi version (US$ 99 with special offers) and a Wi-Fi / 3G version (US$149 with special offers). But guess what ? It is available for U.S. only. Looks like I need to use the tricky method to get it.

Kindle Fire

Lastly, the really cool Andriod-based, colorful, dual-core processor Kindle Fire. Cost only US$ 199 and (also) available in U.S. only, it is really the cloud-enabled device. It includes a cloud-accelerated browser – Amazon Silk, free cloud storage, streaming of songs and videos. In addition, similar to Amazon’s Whispersync technology to automatically sync your library, last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across your devices. On Kindle Fire, Whispersync extends to video. Start streaming a movie on Kindle Fire, then pick up right where you left off on your TV - avoid the frustration of having to find your spot. Not a new technology but it sounds like really easy and as smooth as silk.

iPad-like screen, 100,000 movies and TV titles, runs Android apps, free cloud services, 17 million songs … hey, it is really as good as iPad and a great tablet.

So which one will you get ? I will probably go for Kindle Fire.

(Check out other Kindle related posts for evaluations, tips and tricks)

Before I shamelessly promote myself as a big fan of Kindle Apps, I better tell you that I am also a big fan of Kindle eBook reader. I really love the Kindle Apps as it works very well in tablets like iPad (I think people just use the term “iPad” instead of tablet anyway). Therefore when I know Amazon released the Kindle Cloud Reader, I have to review it …I set up the Cloud Reader without any problem, but it’s not that intuitive to set up your library for offline reading … anyway, here is the full details (with photos by the end of that blog post) of that new offering from Amazon.

1. First of all, go to the homepage of Kindle Cloud Reader. Click the “Sign in to get started”, then sign in with your Amazon account credential in the next screen. That step will then kick start the Kindle Cloud Reader web application, and show you all the eBooks you have purchased for your Kindle.
2. Next step is to increase the local database storage size (up to 50 MBytes) so that the application can save your books to your iPad (or other devices) for offline reading. And here is the tricky part, the application will also try to save the apps for offline use, and you will see that message “Saving app for offline use” in the bottom of the screen.
3. In many cases, that step will return an error message stating “Error saving app. Tap here to try again“. If you encounter this, go to your iPad setting page and clear the cache of Safari and repeat the steps above again. The saving shall then be successful.
4. Then add the apps to home screen. Change name to whatever you like and add to home screen
5. Other than the Book grid view, you can also see the Book list view. You can toggle the views from the lower right corner selection buttons.
6. Same as the Kindle for iPad apps, you can change the settings like font size, color mode.
7. Click any book and you can start reading, and it works pretty much like Kindle for iPads.
8. Now, try exit the apps and start the cloud reader again.
9. If you have not saved the app for offline use successfully (see step 2 and 3 above), you will be greeted with that error message “Cloud Reader could not be opened because it is not connected to the internet“.
10. To really read the books offline, you need to press and hold any book cover in your library, then select “Download & Pin Book.”
11. After the download, you will see the books are “Pinned” with a green color pin icon underneath the downloaded book and ready for offline reading !!
12. And lastly, there is the Kindle shop such that you can buy books directly within the web apps (if you’re online).

After all these set up, you can read the book as any Kindle apps … with three exceptions:

• You cannot currently create new notes and highlights using Kindle Cloud Reader – but notes and highlights you create while reading the book on your Kindle or another Kindle app will be displayed.
• There is no built-in dictionary (I missed it a lot !!).
• It still feels a bit slower than Kindle reader and Kindle apps.

Hope you find this review useful !!

I was told many times by my friends that … “I would take better pictures, if I had a better camera.”, or “I would take better pictures, if I had a more expensive lens”. And of course, many of them said “All I need is a newer camera.”.

In the good old days, you know, a new camera took years to design and make, and then a few years to master, and another few years to make it break. But now camera manufacturers can roll out new cameras one after another every 6 to 9 months. One reason is one can design new cameras easily with all the tools, but another reason is because the consumers also want new cameras every few months.

So even though my favorite camera company, Olympus, spent just two years to rework their E-Px series … people think the company was too slow. Frankly, I don’t get it, I don’t see why you need the latest and greatest camera, to take good photos. Anyway, just yesterday, Olympus announces 3 new cameras (E-P3, E-PL3 and E-PM1), 4 new lens and dozens of accessories.

I am sure these are great cameras and can make magnificent photos. However, I am also sure my two years old E-P1 (the oldest camera in the M43 line) can still take good photos … like a few photos below from Las Vegas I took in May.

Will I buy the new E-P3 ?

Errrrh … yes, of course. I need a newer camera to take better photos …

If you search “Kindle vs iPad” in Google and you will probably find over 6 millions results, in other words this topic has been discussed to death. And of course, Amazon thinks there are many good reasons why Kindle is a better ebook reader and I also blogged before that with certain settings, one can use iPad to read ebooks.

But still, to really find out which device is the better ebook reader, I decided to do an experiment – read the first half of an ebook (“I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted“) with Kindle 2, and then the second half of the same ebook with iPad 2. And here are my findings:

iPad

1. I like the fact that you can check mail, news, tweets, Facebook walls etc. easily while you’re reading your ebook
2. I hate the fact that you can check mail, news, tweets, Facebook walls etc. easily while you’re reading your ebook
3. It’s the faster device of the two
4. The battery lasts only 10 hours, and I don’t like the battery indicator (in percentage) in the upper right corner … it makes me worry about the battery all the time
5. Without a keyboard, the touch gesture can turn the page, highlight a word / sentence, toggle the menu system etc. etc. – in one word, “confusing”
6. I like all the colorful book covers in the home screen. It’s pretty much like the album library in iPod is great, but I still like to see all the CD covers.

Kindle

1. I like the fact that you cannot check mail, news, tweets, Facebook walls etc. easily while you’re reading your ebook
2. I hate the fact that you cannot check mail, news, tweets, Facebook walls etc. easily while you’re reading your ebook
3. The e-ink screen is much much better than iPad (for any serious long form reading), your eyes will never get tired, strained and drained;
4. Battery life of two weeks is good, you can easily finish a book without a recharge;
5. With the keyboard and buttons to go to next / previous page, it is a lot easier to use.
6. You can buy ebook easily with the Kindle shop.

Summary

Without a doubt, Kindle is a much better ebook reader if you like focused long form reading. However, if you can only take one device with you and reading is not your primary purpose, get an iPad. You won’t regret it.

I wrote about how to make the news comes to you, so the natural next step is find a good tool to read / consume the news. While iPhone is my everyday mobile device, but to read news, iPad is really better. So I installed 4 iPad apps – Flipboard, Zite, MobileRSS and Twitter to find my ideal tool to read news; and here is the comparison – how I read an HBR news with the four applications.

Note that it is not an “evaluation report” as I believe each of us have different evaluation criteria and therefore this post will focus how I read the same news with different programs. Lastly, iPad is still not a good tool to read books, Kindle is much better, but it is another story.

Flipboard

Rated the best iPad application in 2010 and I think most of iPad users have this installed. To connect to the news, just select one of the predefined news sources or you can connect the apps to your Twitter account. Following is the screen shot of the news The Only Thing that Really Matters from HBR.

As you can see the apps strip off all the ads, headers and other elements but only show you the news . Of course you can see the original news if you “click” the source link but in essence, the presentation is pretty plain …

Zite

This apps’ tagline is “Personalized Magazine” and indeed you can feed in many news sources to it and also connect your Twitter feeds to it. One thing different from Flipboard is it does not support your Facebook friends’ feeds (yet). Following is the same news from HBR. As you can see the presentation format is pretty good. You can also “inform” the tool that you like this type of news or the source of the news (i.e. HBR in that case), then the program is smart enought to feed more news similar to that (in that case, business news) or from the same source.

MobileRSS

If your news sources are mainly website RSS but not Twitter and Facebook, then MobileRSS is also a good choice. One thing I don’t like much is the all black default color scheme (you can change it to other themes) and you will see some sponsor ads. See below …

Twitter

The last news apps is in fact the Twitter for iPad, and obviously the main news sources are your followers. Since many websites provide both RSS and Tweets, you therefore can use this to view many news. Unlike the above tools, however, it renders the HBR news like what a browser will do … in other words, you will also see the banner ads in the page; and you need to scroll more to see the whole news article.

Summary

All four tools are great for their own purposes, however, none of them are perfect to my purpose yet. If I have to choose, I think I will use Zite more …

Working in a media company has one obvious advantage – we can get information and news first hand from around the world easily. For example, we could watch our own TV channels live and followed every bit of news of the Japan earthquake three months ago or the Osama Bin Laden raid last month. However, if you’re not working in a media company, how can you get the latest news around the world in a timely fashion?

You probably don’t want to check all the newspaper, TV and radio channels, or even mobile apps when you want to know the latest news. I reckon there is one better way … in the world of social networks. That is, make the news comes to you.

Yes, don’t check the latest news by yourself, but let the news comes to you thru the social networks. To do that, you need to however go through some steps – pick your friends carefully, follow the right tweeters, select your favorite newsfeeds, and install the right mobile applications.

Pick your friends carefully

You all know your friends can post their status and sharings in your Facebook wall. So you have a choice, your wall with lots of “I am eating …”, “I am partying with …”, “I am flying to …” etc. etc. or your wall with good, timely and insightful news. Here is how to build your wall with all quality news:

1. Go to “Accounts” in the upper right corner, select “Edit friends” in the pull down list.
2. Click the “Create a List” on top, enter a name of the list such as “News”.
3. Then, the most important part – select friends that shares quality news and insightful status, then click “Create List”.
4. Lastly, go back to your Facebook homepage, click the “Most Recent” on top, and select the list “News”. Voila, you have all the quality news from your friends, in your very own wall.

Follow the right tweeters

Of course not all your Facebook friends are industry experts or journalists in areas you like to go in detail. Another way to get the latest news is to follow the right tweeters. Join the twitter.com, and follow some good tweeters. Or check out any good blogs, then follow the bloggers (you will probably find the “Follow me” button in their blogs). There are hundreds of blogs in the Internet about how to find the good tweeters, so I will not repeat here. However, don’t forget to “Unfollow” some of the tweeters if they are not tweeting the news you want, or just spammers.

Select your favorite newsfeeds

One more new sources are reputable websites – news sites, technology sites etc. etc. Just visit those sites, find the RSS feed button and subscribe to the feeds. You can find many newsreader software in the market to manage those feeds, but to me, my favorite is the Google Reader.

Lastly, install the best mobile applications for news

With the tablets like iPad, it is really a good way to “consume” news. There are a few good apps for iPad to let you read the news your way, check out the comparison of Zite, Flipboard, MobileRSS and Twitter iPad version.

I have to admit I did not pay much attention to Kindle for iPad as the tool to read eBooks, even the application “looks” good with iPad and iPad 2. Reason is simply that I have a Kindle and it’s a much better device for reading. However, in most trips I will bring both my Kindle and iPad 2 along – the Kindle for eBooks, and the iPad 2 for emails, Facebook, RSS, and eMagazines like Bloomberg Businessweek.

On the other hand, there are trips that bringing two devices is a bit too heavy; and I have to decide – Kindle or iPad 2 ? For me, sometimes it is Kindle (when I have a book to finish …) and sometimes it is the iPad 2 (say, when there is a new issue of Businessweek to read). So when there is only the iPad 2 with me, and I want to read a few chapters of an eBook, I need to use Kindle for iPad apps. And to make this “reading experience” a more pleasant one, I applied the following settings to the application …

Pick the right books

All your purchased ebooks are stored in the Amazon archive, you can transfer all the books from the archive to your iPad but my recommendations is to only transfer the ebook(s) you are reading to your iPad, that save space in your iPad and also the synchronization time every time you start up the application.

Change the settings

From the lower left corner of the home page, click the “info” icon to start up the Settings menu. There are only three options but I highly recommend to turn on the “Basic reading mode”. It means it will not use the page turning effect when you touch the left / right hand side margin, but just sliding the pages.

Download the dictionary

By installing the Kindle for iPad application, the dictionary is not downloaded (it is however come as a standard in Kindle). All you need to do is to “touch” any one word from any eBook, and hold it for a while, then a dialogue will be popped up and ask you to confirm to download the dictionary.

Change the view options

It’s probably the most important part of this mini survival guide. One of the key problems to use iPad as eBook reader is the fact your eyes will get tired easily just by viewing the beautiful screen continuously, so we need to tune the screen to make it pleasant to look at.

In any page of your eBook, touch screen, and select “Aa” in the bottom menu to start up the View Options menu. What I did is changed all the four options – set the right character size and brightness that fit your reading environment. Set the background to black color, and lastly set it to single column reading (it’s better than two columns when you use your iPad 2 sideways, since you’re probably using the Smart Cover).

Hope the above helps a bit to your reading with Kindle for iPad. Enjoy !