Amazon Appstore

Yesterday Amazon launched their Appstore for Android. Without spending too much time on this, here’s the biggest thing that the Amazon Appstore has that I think have been sorely missing from the stores up until now: Sharing app links.

Seriously, why hasn’t anyone done this before now? Isn’t it a no-brainer that you’d want people to recommend apps to their friends? It’ll make you sell more apps, and it’s good for the user.

I’ve wished tons of times that Xbox Live made it easier to give my brother a link to buy the game I’m playing so we can play it together, but no such luck.

Well the Appstore finally adds this to Android. There’s a share link for every app that will let you send a link via text or email to a friend so they can get the same app. I do wish the link opened in the Appstore itself instead on the Web, but it’s still a huge feature that the other stores lack.

Know your address

Sometimes my Gmail account gets emails to it that don’t belong to me. These are usually legitimate emails intended for some probably-distant relation with my last name but a different first name. I can understand that, because it just means that the sender got the address wrong when they sent the email.

However, recently I got a confirmation email for an online purchase under someone else’s name. One of these rogue Casteels purchased something from American Eagle and then put in the wrong email address when they checked out. How do you do that? Don’t you know your own email address?

iPad

I thought about calling this post “iCrap” or something like that, but do I really need to come up with a parody to make fun of that name? I think the official name is enough of a joke that I shouldn’t have to bother.

My biggest complaint about the iPad is just that it’s a disappointment. I’m a huge fan of tablet PCs. I’m on my second convertible tablet, and I don’t think I’d ever want to buy a normal notebook again after getting used to the tablet. So, when the rumors of Apple’s tablet started I was excited to see what they’d come up with. And now after all of the build-up, when they finally announce their device, I look at it and what I see is not a tablet computer at all, but a giant iPhone. I feel like I’ve been hoodwinked.

I’ve found it kind of surprising that Apple didn’t jump into the tablet market sooner than now. Macs have a reputation of being perfect for artists, and whether that’s still well-deserved or if it’s just a hold-over from when their competitive operating systems were uglier, Apple still has an image as an artist’s computer. I’m sure Apple is aware of this reputation and loves it, and it seems like they’ve spent their advertising money to maintain that image. Even if Apple doesn’t target artists specifically with their recent advertising, they definitely target people who are artsy. The vendors of computing tools for artists support this image, too, as Adobe and Macromedia always made their software first for the Mac, and WACOM even made their external drawing tablets match the look of the Macintosh G4. So wouldn’t it have been natural for Apple to take that image and make a tablet PC that was actually tailored to these artists that flock to their company, and that are already using tablet equipment for drawing on their computers?

Instead of a tablet PC tailored to artists, with pressure-sensitive pens for drawing in the programs that already run on their operating system, Apple opts not to make a Macintosh tablet at all, but instead releases the iPad: a touch-screen built for use with the fingers that runs the iPhone operating system. They’ll try to make you feel excited about the fact that it will run all of the apps that have been built for the iPhone, but what you should really notice is that it won’t run the apps that are built for OS X, including all of the artist-oriented software that would have been great with a tablet PC, like Photoshop. Not that you’ll actually miss Photoshop on the iPad, because even if it ran OS X the screen isn’t pressure sensitive, so drawing on it would still feel like finger-painting.

Apple calls the iPad, “Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device….” Is that a little too optimistic for a device that’s just a big version of a device they’ve already had for years?

Buzz Will Work

So if you have a Gmail account you probably noticed last week that Google added a new feature: Buzz. It’s basically Google’s version of Facebook’s version of Twitter. It’s nothing new or exciting, just a new implementation of someone else’s idea.

The really new and exciting part of Google Buzz actually happened this morning, one week after Buzz was launched: My friend Jason started following me on it.

Jason’s like a barometer for how successful technology is, mostly because he’s so resistant to it. His work had to give him a pager to get a hold of him because he didn’t yet have a cell phone when he graduated from college and got a job. That’s why when he eventually got a blog, joined Facebook, and even bought an iPhone, we knew those things were hits.

So, really, I don’t know if Jason is going to actually use Buzz because it gets set up automatically by your Gmail account and you automatically start following your Gmail contacts. But of course, I think that’s exactly why it’s going to work. Jason and other people like him that would probably never bother with fads like Twitter will use Buzz because it’s built in to something that they’re already using.

When Google came out with Google Talk I wrote a short-sighted post about how it was such a bad idea because everyone was already well established with their favorite chat programs. I thought a new chat program wouldn’t succeed because there would be no reason for anyone to switch away from the chat service where all of their friends are in favor of a new one with no users and (at the time) no better features. Time has proven me wrong. What I didn’t foresee was that Google would add it to Gmail and overnight make it so that I had more friends on Google Talk than I had on any other chat service. Now it’s the chat service that I prefer.

I think it’ll be the same for Google Buzz. Buzz isn’t anything really new, but it will work anyway. It will work because everyone will use it. Everyone will use it because they already use Gmail.