My friend has an app for his iPhone (it’s also available for other phones) called Trapster which alerts you to police officers on the road you’re travelling before you get to them. To some degree, it works like a radar detector, but instead it relies on a network of other iPhone users that have the Trapster app (almost 4 million to date) to “tag” or mark police officers, speed traps and now even accidents, when they seem them.

As cool as all the features and the functionality is, I got to wondering today if the spread of this app and others that are perhaps similar has put any kind of significant dent in the revenues generated by speeding tickets because people are avoiding them using the app.

Part of me thinks that it’s had to have some kind of noticeable impact, but maybe it really hasn’t been that much more than when radar detectors first came out. Do you think there’s any chance of this kind of an app being outlawed?

Post from: EveryJoe

iPhone App Impact on Speeding Ticket Revenue

As you can see from the screen shot above; new notifications, requests and messages are now all grouped together by the apps that generated them.

Messages, your applications and a list of your online and available friends have shifted from the bottom-right-hand portion of the screen over to the far left in a sidebar type of layout design. The expanding chat that we’ve been used to remains available on the bottom-right-hand side still.

Account settings, privacy and preferences options have remained largely the same in the top right-hand corner underneath the existing search box functionality.

It appears there’s significantly more space in the main center column for updates, wall posts, the ever popular quizzes and the real guts of the Facebook experience. Makes sense to provide more room for this area.

Suggestions, ads, events and similar items are still remaining on the right-hand sidebar area.

You can jump into a tour of the new site layout for Facebook by taking this tour.

Post from: EveryJoe

Facebook Releases New Simplified Redesign

My boss’s computer seems to sucking all of space and time into a folder named "WinSxS". Currently the folder is at 20GB of space I think. That’s almost half the entire size of the hard drive.

After doing a quick search online about what might be causing this WinSxS issue, it seems to be a fairly common problem. The kicker is that there doesn’t seem to be any real solution to the problem. What I’m not sure about is if it really started with Vista or not.

My boss is running Windows Vista Business, the web search results say people are experiencing it with their Windows 7 machines too. I’m running Windows XP Professional still, and my folder is less than 1GB in size.

Do you keep running out of hard drive space? Go take a look at this folder and see what size it’s consuming on your drive. Let me know what you find and what steps you’ve tried to take to resolve the issue if anything.

Post from: EveryJoe

Is Half Your Hard Drive Taken by WINSXS

I decided it was time to try another desktop application out to see if anything had drastically improved since the last time I used something other than Twhirl. It appears that nothing much has changed with Seesmic for Windows.

I still think the use of screen space isn’t very efficient. In the image above I have it maximized and can only fit three panels on my screen. With my current arrangement of Twhirl windows, I can get five panels onscreen at once.

I also don’t like that each item I click on to access (like Private messages, different accounts, or replies) opens yet another panel. I then have to scroll left and right to change what I’m looking at on screen. I’ve never been a fan of scrolling left/right for much of anything.

The Searches functionality is okay, simple enough to use and you can set it up to save your searches. I just don’t like more and more panels opening, increasing the amount and distance I have to scroll left/right to get to anything.

Looks like I won’t be switching over to Seesmic for Windows anytime soon. Here’s the rub though, Seesmic purchased Twhirl awhile back. Let’s just hope they don’t get rid of Twhirl, hopefully they’ll get rid of Seesmic for Windows instead.

Post from: EveryJoe

Trying Out Seesmic for Windows Again

Significant changes in developer tools: Here’s an area where I think Microsoft does good work. The amount of resources I have available to me to both use and learn Microsoft applications and developer more solutions on the Windows platform. Similar to the changes with client applications, there would be changes to developer expectations as well. This impact would probably be less those with the evolving standards of other development platforms and languages.

Hardware changes: This one I’m not so sure about. Although their is something to be said for knowing that if you develop hardware to work with a PC system, there’s at least a known economy of scale available. The article states there would need to be another major player that would arise to standardize hardware needs again. I’m not so sure that would be Apple by any means.

I’m sure there will be plenty of disagreement with this article because there were plenty of comments on the PC World article as well. I’m very eager to hear what our readers have to say and look forward to bouncing ideas off each other in the comments.

Blast away!

Post from: EveryJoe

What If… the Windows Were Closed? Part 2

Of course there’s the initial knee-jerk reaction that life would be fantastic without this giant monolithic software elephant in the room. After all, everything they make is crap and they strong-arm competition and their business partners to do what they want. Right?

It’s not that easy, the article discusses these potential impacts to the industry around us and our everyday lives changing because of that change to the industry.

Unexpected results with client applications: Except for the fairly recent changes in the Office user interface, most Windows applications share a familiar if not very similar interface with other Windows applications. With the failure of Microsoft, people would need to start learning a much wider variety of user-interfaces.

Stay tuned and read my follow-up to this post with some more impacts of a world without Windows.

Post from: EveryJoe

What If… the Windows Were Closed?

That may all change now that Google Chrome now has the ability to download and install a variety of extensions.

I’ve decided to try a few out. Since I’ve also decided that I really only use Google Chrome for a set list of uses, I was only really interested in downloading extensions that were directly related to other Google tools that I use on a regular basis.

I downloaded and installed the following:

• Google Dictionary
• Google Voice
• Google Wave
• Google Mail
• Google Calendar
• Google Reader

So far I like the integration of Google Dictionary, Google Voice and Google Wave the best so far. Mainly because they open in a small panel that extends from the toolbar, not in another browser window.

Google Dictionary seems to take quite awhile to load the information. I think I could probably type in www.m-w.com and get the answer I was looking for faster.

We’ll see how everything else plays out as I continue to use these new Google Chrome extensions and see if they start to slow the browser down altogether.

Post from: EveryJoe

Installing Some Google Chrome Extensions

reimage PC Repair was looking for things like system hardware information, general PC Stability issues, PC Security issues. After the scan was completed it detected a variety of issues with the hardware performance and software application stability. Perhaps most of this was true, but I always wonder about applications like this, especially when they show these graphs. Do they show your system being horrible a selling tool to get you to purchase the full-blown application?

In this case, when the scan was done, it prompted me that I’d need a repair to fix all the problems. In this case the repair would cost me $48, which was $20 off the regular price.

It would be interesting to find out just how good of a job reimage PC Repair would be able to do on my machine. The repair process is stated to fix things like rebuild the Windows platform, repair damaged OS files, refresh drivers, eliminate pop-ups, remove malware and fix registry key issues.

I’ll work on cleaning up all of those items myself with my other utilities and applications I’m already familiar with and that are free.

Post from: EveryJoe

reimage PC Repair Tool Results

Not so quick!

When I first wrote about my experiences with the Google Chrome browser, I was shocked that there wasn’t more integration with Google’s own applications. Applications like, oh I don’t know…Google Bookmarks perhaps!?

I couldn’t believe it! Here was a Google application, a web browser no less that couldn’t even install its own Google Toolbar to use with the browser. And with that omission, I can’t even access my Google Bookmarks easily with the browser. To me that was an amazing fail.

So I was hoping with this latest update to the browser and the announcement that I could now sync my bookmarks, this is what I had been waiting for all this time. Alas, still not what I expected. All it did was go read the bookmarks I had in my default browser, Firefox, and sync those with Google Chrome.

Can someone please tell me why Google Toolbar still can’t be installed with Google Chrome?

Post from: EveryJoe

Google Chrome Gets Bookmark Sync… Kind of

reimage provides a downloadable application that you install and let run on your machine. Once the application gets going it seems to be running fairly quickly and is providing lots of information about the what it’s gathering from my machine. As it goes it’s also showing me how my machine compares to the worldwide average of other machines. Not sure how the worldwide average is as helpful to me as perhaps North American average since I’m in North America, but it’s all still interesting.

I’ll follow-up later with another post that illustrates what suggestions I was provided and just what else may be wrong with my system after the scan.

My initial impression of the reimage PC Repair application right now is very high. We’ll let you know how the rest of the experience goes.

Post from: EveryJoe

Trying Out reimage PC Repair Online