Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI. Nokia blamed the store’s unresponsiveness on unusually high traffic and did its best to address the problem, but even those efforts by its own admission resulted in only “intermittent performance improvements.”

[Ovi, Nokias New App Store, Off to Rocky Start | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD]

That reminded me of a nice post from 37signals. Nokia, like Blackberry and Microsoft obviously copied Apple’s App. Store and that’s a problem. When copying you skip understanding, and understanding is how you make progress. When you copy, you don’t understand how or why something is how it is. Instead, you simply “repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.”

My other big gripe is content, the lack of quality content deters me from ever entering Ovi. Who was given the SDK to develop new apps for Ovi? Here’s a list of the top most downloaded Apps in the App Store from July 10th, 2008 (when the store just opened) compared to the Ovi store.

Honestly, if a Star Trek ringtone is the best thing your store has to offer, I won’t be coming in any time soon. On top of all that, the store is hard to navigate, difficult to log into, and slow. Nokia, do you actually expect anyone to go there? Give me Pandora, a good Twitter app, and make it easy to work with, then I’ll swing by.

Instead, we should be talking to the creator of the page directly and having them remove or modify the content of the page all-together, it will remove the results from not only Google and Yahoo, but everywhere else you haven’t thought of.

We’re signing legislation like the Internet Safety Act that prevents people from accessing the internet anonymously. Supposedly this is going to stop sex offenders and help the police catch them. Instead, it’s going to do more harm than good, completely eradicating available and open WiFi in places like Starbucks and your favorite sports bar.

We also take them off Facebook and Myspace. Instead, we should be figuring out a way to stop them from making sexual advances towards kids all together. Facebook has removed 5,585 sex offenders from their site since May of last year. Great, the only reason we’re doing this is because it’s measurable and easy to enact. This quote made me really think about us concentrating on the things we fear, instead of real problems:

“Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.”
[Boing Boing: Internet not full of pedos, the statistical edition]

Last week, I wrote about doctors making patients sign EULAs that disallow them to give feedback on the services they received on review sites like RateMDs.com. Another instance of not concentrating on the real problem, but simply being afraid of losing clients due to poor service. Why doesn’t Apple make people sign EULAs to not review their products? That’s because they try to make great products which customers will review positively. We need to figure out how to make these tools work for us, instead of trying to fight them.

“They’re basically forcing the patients to choose between health care and their First Amendment rights, and I really find that repulsive,” Swapceinski said.
[Docs seek gag orders to stop patients' reviews (AP)]

Luckily they will never be able to stop posting on the Internet and put “out of court settlement” into extinction. This is simply silly legislature, and the doctors that are complaining are clearly the bad ones. How about this suggestion: improve your practice so the reviews you get on the sites and blogs are good, then use that to sell yourself.

But here’s the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

[The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time]

Over is the time of “bigger is better”, welcome to the era of efficiency. I love how the author relates fast laptops to SUVs, and I think it makes sense. When fuel prices in the United States were on the rise, people started buying more efficient vehicles that better suited their real-world uses. With the recession in full swing, we’re seeing the same idea trickle down to consumer goods. This is a large leap in understanding the beauty of small and simple.

Your favorite site doesn’t provide news feeds?
This free online service converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly.

This is what at least Feed43 advertises they can do. So I tested it with my two favorite reads: Jeremy Clarkson’s column on Times Online, and NewOrder’s Network & Security portal.

With a little bit of tinkering (about a 1/2 an hour), I was able to configure my very own custom RSS feed to subscribe to in my news aggregator. Sure, it requires a little knowledge of code, but their instructions were pretty good. I love how specific the tool gets, letting you extract even the smallest snippets of information and make the feed as usable and good looking as possible.

Check out the two feeds I created and feel free to subscribe:

1. Jeremy Clarkson Column | Times Online
2. NewOrder – computer security and networking portal

Scroggin said that he receives several notices each month with requests that he remove suspected file sharers from his network. Each time, he gets such a notice from an entertainment company, he sends the same reply.

“I ask for their billing address,” Scroggin said. “Usually, I never hear back.”

Snipped from CNET News.

First, I got a couple eye-level photos of the optimistic little shoe
that turned out about as badly as most eye-level shots of the ground
do. But, on review [always review the first few shots and zoom way in],
I thought the color looked cool on the dark street, so I got on one
knee to take another. Yeah, better. But, it still looked like a lame
overhead snapshot that was way too dark and noisy. So, I did something
that surprised me.

I laid on the sidewalk. All the way down. On my gut on 50° of western San Francisco concrete.

And, I took my time, thinking about the aperture (all the way open
for depth of field) and the available light (very little, so I put the
the camera right on the ground to steady it). I snapped a dozen or more
shots with slightly different settings. No idea what I was doing.
People walked by, cars passed, the L barreled by, but I kept shooting
until I was satisfied that I might have something. Then, I
grabbed the shoe, stood up, and trotted back up the hill, triumphant,
with a recovered piece of footwear, plus what I suspected might be at
least one pretty good photo.

I like how it turned out.

It brought back memories, that’s all. I remember lying down on my stomach on some nasty pavement to frame a shot, I remember risking my camera by resting it on some uneven surface hoping it won’t fall off the end of a cliff (just to get a sharp picture).

This theory applies to everything else you do; you’ll fail at first, but then you’ll get better. Here’s one I took in August:

So, here it is, thank you brave men and women, served or serving, dead or alive, every single one of you is responsible for my liberty.

Our soon-to-be President Barack Obama is already showing his support on http://change.gov. I like this bit from the site specifically, it’s definitely an encouraging and very true quote:

“When you choose to serve — whether it’s your nation, your community or simply your neighborhood — you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That’s why it’s called the American dream.”