Reviews

Some Thoughts on Cisco WebEx Mail

Michael Osterman — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:40:04 +0000

Cisco recently announced WebEx Mail.

What are the implications of Cisco’s entry into the hosted messaging business? Here are two cents on what I think this means:

I have maintained for a long time that Microsoft faces perhaps more competition from Cisco than it does from Google, despite the formidable competitor that the latter represents. Cisco’s focus on the enterprise with WebEx Mail reinforces that.
The length of time that Cisco took to introduce this offering has been somewhat surprising. Given that Cisco purchased PostPath nearly 15 months ago and Jabber 14 months ago, and that IronPort and WebEx have been in the Cisco stable for longer than that, I thought that Cisco’s announcement would have been made much earlier this year.
Cisco’s entry into this market will help decision makers to feel more comfortable about SaaS messaging. With each major new entrant into the market, the underlying objections to SaaS will diminish, albeit slowly, as prospective customers realize that major, trusted vendors are supporting corporate-grade SaaS capabilities.
The only piece really missing from the Cisco messaging lineup is an archiving capability. Although there are a number of good third party archiving solutions that can be used with WebEx Mail, it makes sense that Cisco would want to acquire its own archiving vendor to make the integration with its other capabilities in WebEx Mail easier. I have a guess as to who that might be, but haven’t heard definitively who might be acquired.

A Better Way to Share Links in Email

Ben Gross — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:27:08 +0000

I regularly share links with friends and colleagues. I use several social bookmarking services, but the vast majority I share via email. Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer have a function to create a new message with an email link. The main disadvantage of sending links using the built-in browser methods is that the links they generate are prone to breaking unless the whole message is converted to HTML rather than plain text.

I prefer a bookmarklet for emailing links. Bookmarklets are bits of JavaScript saved into a bookmark that act like simple browser plugins. BetterExplained’s How To Make a Bookmarklet For Your Web Application is an excellent introduction. Opera and Google Chrome browsers do not currently offer functionality for emailing a link, so a bookmarklet is your only option. My version of the bookmarklet has a few improvements over the built-in browser methods, extensions, and other similar bookmarklets I’ve seen. Previously, I constantly made minor adjustments when emailing URLs to reduce the chances that the link would work correctly for the recipient. The new version of the bookmarklet has improved my workflow for sharing links.

The bookmarklet:

    javascript: function trim12(str)
    {
        var str=str.replace(/^\s\s*/,''),
            ws=/\s/,
            i=str.length;
        while(ws.test(str.charAt(--i)));
        return str.slice(0,i+1);
    }
    location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+encodeURIComponent(trim12(document.title))
    +'&BODY='+encodeURIComponent(trim12(document.title))
    +encodeURIComponent('\n<'+location.href+'>')

To use this bookmarklet yourself, simply drag the following link to the bookmark bar in your browser. [Email link]

The most common way that browsers implement the email a link feature is to create a new email message with the document title in the subject and the link in the body. Most email clients will recognize these links as URLs and turn them into clickable links that you can open in your browser. There are several problems with the built in methods for emailing links.

The first problem is that the algorithms that recognize the URLs do not always recognize valid URLs or may only partially recognize the URL leaving the recipient with a broken link. In these cases you have to copy the URL from your email client and paste it into your browser. Certainly not a difficult or time-consuming task, but every bit of additional effort reduces that chance that the recipient will click on the link
The second problem is that if a URL is long the email client may wrap the line with the URL. There are several ways that email clients wrap long lines and conflicts arise periodically between different email client line wrapping styles. When links with URLs are wrapped this creates additional complexity for the receiving email client to correctly parse the URL and increases the chance of failure. Dan’s Mail Format Site has a nice description of the URL wrapping issues in his Body: Line Length article.
The third problem is that some web pages include additional whitespace in the document title to visually offset the text. The extra whitespace is not desirable when mailing the link as it can make the title line less readable and add unwanted blank lines before the URL.

Safari, works around the first two problems by creating a rich text/HTML email message and turns the URL into a real hypertext link. Safari and Internet Explorer both have the option to email an entire webpage. In this case, the browser simply copies the HTML from the webpage into an email message. This method solves the problems of URLs being incorrectly recognized or poorly wrapped, as the recipient’s email client does not need to parse the text to discover the link. I generally avoid emailing entire web pages as most mail clients parse a very restrictive subset of HTML to reduce security vulnerabilities and the page formatting may not appear as intended.

Most bookmarklets I have seen to email a link mirror the built-in browser functionality and thus have the same problems. Bookmarklets often have an additional problem where ampersands and other meta characters are not properly escaped and may cause the bookmarklet to fail or truncate the titles.

My modified bookmarklet presented above includes the document title in subject and the document title, a carriage return, and the URL in the body. The URL is wrapped in angle brackets < >, which most allows the majority of email clients to correctly interpret complex and wrapped URLs. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends this method in Wrappers for URIs in plain text as does RFC2396 Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax, the specification that defines the modern URL. Finally, I use the JavaScript function encodeURIComponent to protect page titles from ampersands and other characters breaking them. The \n version of the escaped newline character must be used as opposed to %0A. In later revisions of my bookmarklet, I included trim12 from Steven Levithan’s Faster JavaScript Trim, which will trim excess whitespace from the document title so that the subject line is not surrounded by spaces and there are no blank lines before the URL.

The bookmarklet relies on the browser’s default mailto: handler to determine which email application should be used to creat the message with the link. Each browser and operating system has multiple ways to set the mailto: handler. Changing the default mailto: handler is generally straightforward for most desktop email clients, but can be more complicated for webmail clients such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Here are a few options to start with. Changes in Firefox 3.5 greatly simplified the procedure for changing the e-mail program used by Firefox. The Affixa application is a simple way to change the mailto: handler for Windows users to set popular desktop clients, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail as the default handler. The Internet Options settings for Internet Explorer make it straightforward to change the default to desktop another application or Windows Live Hotmail. Clint Talbert’s page Click Testing for Protocol Handling is a quick and easy way to test if your mailto: handler is working correctly.

Updated August 2nd, 2009 to add trim code and including information on mailto: protocol handlers. Fixed problem with CMS HTML corrector breaking bookmarklet code.

Trends in Password Masking Security and Usability

Ben Gross — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:57:00 +0000

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball pointed me to Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column Stop Password Masking, which resulted in a thoughtful and interesting thread of conversations and a few experimental solutions. Password masking refers to the practice of displaying an alternate character, usually a star or a bullet in place of the actual characters typed into a password field. The idea is that this prevents another party from viewing the password while it is entered. Nielsen argues that in most cases masked passwords are not needed since should surfing is not a major issue and that this is even less of an issue on mobile devices. He says masked passed passwords often reduce usability by increasing the number of errors since users cannot see what they are typing. This problem is further compounded on mobile devices where typing is more difficult and slower. Since users are less certain about what they are typing, they are much more likely to choose passwords that are simplistic or copy and paste the passwords from less secure locations. Nielsen says that high value password forms should offer an optional checkbox for masking passwords so that they can be used on an as needed basis.

Jason Montgomery’s Response to Nielsen’s “Stop Password Masking” on the SANS Institute’s The Application Security Street Fighter Blog that provides a more nuanced commentary on the tradeoffs between security and usability for password masking. Montgomery argues that Nielsen’s points are valid and suggests that password managers, pass phrases, and two factor authentication can sidestep some the problems by increasing the security of stored passwords as well as the ease of recalling them. Earlier I reviewed, 1Password, a password manager for Mac and iPhone that I use daily.

Bruce Schneier, a respected security expert, agreed with Nielsen in his brief response, The Problem with Password Masking. His post generated a large number of comments, which caused Schneier to temper his opinion in a later article The Pros and Cons of Password Masking. Schneier concludes that even though there are significant downsides to password masking, the practice is less problematic than either not masking passwords at all or complicating the interface with an optional password masking checkbox. The second article also generated a thoughtful discussion in the comments. In Strong Web Passwords, Schneier summarizes the Usenix HotSec07 article Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything? by Florencio, Herley, and Coskun, which argues that complex passwords do little to increase security when adequate policies are in place to limit the number of password attempts. Schneier suggests that the password masking feature on BlackBerries with SureType (non-QWERTY) keyboards and the iPhone (see: iPhone 2.0 password masking) that shows the current character and masks all previous characters is a reasonable alternative.

Farhad Manjoo’s Slate Magazine column, Fix your terrible, insecure passwords in five minutes, offers a solid set of suggestions for creating better passwords and describes why this is important in light of the recent Twitter break in. Macworld’s Joe Kissell offers his own set of suggestions for creating better passwords in a series of articles listed in Top password tips

The ongoing discussion led several developers to create prototypes that demonstrate password masking techniques. Each implementation has an online demo and source code publicly available. All prototypes are currently written in jQuery.

Stefan Ullrich’s iPhone-like password fields using jQuery and Oliver Storm’s Mypass each implements a password masking field similar to the iPhone and BlackBerries with SureType that displays the current typed character, but masks all previous characters by replacing them with bullets.
Byron Rode’s showPassword is a jQuery plugin that implements a password entry field that defaults to fully masking the password with bullets, but also includes Nielsen’s proposed checkbox to display the password when requested.
arc90 created two experimental password masking implementations. The first, HalfMask creates a masking effect by placing translucent random characters on top of the original password characters. This allows the person entering the password to view the original, with some concentration, but makes it far more difficult for another person to casually observe the password. The second implementation, HashMask, masks the password in a standard way by replacing each character typed with a bullet, but adds a visual representation of the password in the form of a Sparklines. This way the person entering the password has a visual indication that the password is correct, although they need to remember the Sparkline.
Mattt Thompson’s Chroma-Hash was inspired by arc90’s HashMask and masks passwords in the standard way, but adds a visualization of the password as it is typed using colored bars generated from a hash of the password. This allows users to quickly check that the visual representation is correct before entering submit. It has the side benefit of allowing fast comparisons when password confirmations are required for entering new or changed passwords. Lee Gao created pyChroma, a Chroma-Hash implementation in Python, which has source, but unfortunately no online demo.

Finally, Kevin Vigneault describes considers several other related options in his post Confirming Passwords Is Annoying: Is There a Better Way?, which was a result of a thread on IxDA “Confirm password” field - Superfluous? that appeared several months before Nielsen’s column.

Article updated July 31st, 2009 to add additional references.

Sharing and Collaboration with Evernote

Michael Sampson — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:34:04 +0000

One of my long time favorite services—Evernote—has just implemented the first phase of its collaboration strategy. Until the last week of June, Evernote was solely a personal information management service, offering both a rich client for full online-offline access on various operating systems and devices, as well as a Web-accessible service. Even before the release of the new collaboration capabilities, Evernote was pretty fantastic:

the ability to have multiple synchronized notebooks
note items that could be tagged, for search and find
various smartphone clients, enabling auto-geotagging of photos and text comments…along with geographic-based searches of notes that were generated in proximity to a certain location.
text recognition in photos and pictures, so that you can search for a name or number in text and photos. Full-text search meet full-text-in-image search.

Phase 1: Shared Notebooks in Evernote Web

The June 25th update of Evernote added notebook sharing through the Web client. If you are paying customer (and therefore have a premium account) you can enable others to view and edit items in your notebooks; if you are not a paying customer, you can allow others to view but not modify your notes. In this first phase, all sharing is initiated and enacted within Evernote Web, not from any of the rich clients.

Here’s the Evernote video about the new sharing capabilities:

There are three ways that an Evernote notebook can be shared. It can be published to the world, and therefore accessible via a public URL that the user can define. It can be shared with a group of individuals, where each is required to log into their Evernote account. Or it can be shared with individuals, with no log in required. In this latter case, the notebook could be accessed by anyone knowing the address, but its security by obscurity. If you can find it, you can get in.

In phase 1 of shared Evernote notebooks, you can only initiate sharing and access a shared notebook through Evernote Web. Sharing cannot be started from one of the Evernote desktop or mobile clients, and after someone else has shared one of their notebooks with you, it the shared notebook will not synchronize into your desktop or mobile client.

Phase 2:

Although specific details, features and timings have not been released by Evernote, it appears likely that sharing will be baked into the desktop and mobile clients in phase 2. This would mean that a user will be able to designate a notebook for sharing from one of the Evernote rich clients, and also that any shared notebooks will be synchronized into their Evernote clients.

Analysis

Why am I writing about Evernote? Aren’t they merely a niche player in a crowded market? Here’s my reasoning, about why I find them interesting.

First, Evernote have played the “software plus services” strategy very well. The service is seamless—it works on the Web, it works on my Mac, it works on my PC, it works on my iPhone, it works on my HP iPAQ, and it can work on a BlackBerry. Regardless of what device you have at a particular moment, you can access all of your information from anywhere, and create new information that’s captured into your Evernote notebooks. The Evernote team have done an exemplary job.

Second, the introduction of sharing and collaboration is a natural extension for Evernote. What works so well on or at a personal level—the metaphor around notebooks and pages essentially—should extend up to a shared notebook and shared pages.

Third, while the extension into sharing and collaboration is natural, it is also fraught with some major challenges that Evernote will have to deal with. For example, you can currently only share a entire notebook, not a subset of the items therein. Will Evernote take the 37signals Backpack approach and enable sharing on a note-by-note basis? Equally, the power of Evernote as a personal information management tool is in its ability to segregate items into notebooks, but to permit a second approach to the re-aggregation of them based on metadata tags. Thus at a personal level, Evernote enables you to put the information into a note in a particular notebook, but then assign meaning to that note based on tags, which can then be linked in with items in other notebooks. The sharing and collaboration challenge is whether Evernote will permit the sharing of a tag, not a notebook. If a tag was shared, then an assemblage of items from multiple notebooks would be shared, not a notebook as such.

Fourth, and finally for this blog post, will Evernote embrace real-time joint editing and review of Evernote items? Today I can make changes in a note that are then synchronized to you. Will Evernote extend their offering so that you and I can share a notebook (or tag), and then work together on a note—simultaneously editing the same item, and seeing each other’s changes in real-time?

In conclusion, Evernote is already a must-have application in my tool kit. This first step of sharing has made it even more attractive, and future steps will only increase its attractiveness.

Pingdom Free Accounts Work With iPhone Application

Ben Gross — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:06:29 +0000

Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service that can notify you via email or SMS when your web server, mail server, or another services goes offline. The service offers reports that are useful for tracking availability, response time, and errors for your servers over time. I have recommended the Pingdom service in the past. See Review of the Pingdom uptime monitoring service The basic package is $10 a month and comes with five service checks, 20 SMS alerts, and unlimited email alerts. The business package is $40 a month and comes with 30 service checks, 200 SMS alerts, discounts on additional SMS alerts, and unlimited email alerts. Additional checks are $6 a year each and additional SMS messages are available for $0.45/basic and $0.20/business.

Yesterday, Pingdom announced that it would begin to offer a free account that comes with one service check and 20 SMS messages. Additional SMS messages are available for $0.45 each, although additional checks are not. Currently, the free account has all the same features as the paid account including checks down to one-minute resolution. The only constrain is that you must log into your free account every ninety days to keep it active. There are many uptime monitoring services that have free accounts for a single service, but I have been a Pingdom customer for over a year now and have been very happy with the service and regularly recommend it. The pricing of the service is geared towards business users and I suspect many individuals will be happy with the free account.

The Pingdom released a free iPhone application in January. I tested the iPhone application with a free account and it worked the same as a paid account. The Pingdom mobile application is currently very basic, but can be useful if you want to quickly look at the status of your services and the uptime and response time for each service for the last 30 days. The application will also show you information about each check. It is not possible to see longer-term trends, details on errors, or to make any changes on your services. Hopefully, Pingdom will add features to the mobile application in future releases. If the service took advantage of Apple’s push notification for iPhones it could remove the need to SMS alerts for users with iPhones.

Bookmarklets Improve Reading and Watching Online

Ben Gross — Mon, 11 May 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I find that the layout, typography, user contributed content or constantly rotating advertisements detract from my ability to efficiently read or watch online content. I’ve listed a few tools that come in the form of browser bookmarklets that connect with services which help present content in a way that is more conducive to focus. Bookmarklets are small bits of Javascript that you can save as a bookmark in your browser. All of these bookmarklets and the services they use are free.

TidyRead and Readability will take a long article and reformat with a cleaner layout and optionally a larger font. Afterwards, the pages are typically much nicer to read onscreen. TidyRead is also a Firefox extension.

PageZipper works with articles that have been broken up into multiple pages. The bookmarklet recognizes the next page and will load it automatically as you scroll. This tool makes content such as the New York Times Magazine articles easier to read. PageZipper is also offered as Firefox extension.

Quietube will take videos from YouTube, Vimeo and similar services and put them in their own clutter free page. No comments, ratings, or ads included.

Medis Fuel Cell Device Charger Review

Ben Gross — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:23:36 +0000

The Medis 24/7 XTREME Portable Charger (also known as the starter kit) is fuel cell-based portable power source designed for small consumer electronics such as cell phones, MP3 players and GPS units.

The fuel cell is relatively compact, it’s approximately the same width, slightly deeper and 2/3rds the length of the portable 2.5 inch hard disk I carry with me when I travel. The associated power pack cable plugs into the top of the charger, which adds approximately three inches in length. The total weight is just over a half a pound. This all leads up to something that is a too bulky to keep in your lap or next to you in the seat, but the cord is three feet long so you should be able to keep it by your feet without a problem.

Activating the fuel cell is simple. You remove a plastic strip, squeeze the charger together and you are done. According to Medis’ specifications (PDF), the charger will deliver 20-Watt hours, which equates to 30 hours of talk time or 60-80 hours of iPod use. Medis says the device outputs 3.8 to 5.4 volts, 4-Watt max and 1-Amp max. This means fuel cell should be good for between 3-6 charges on your smartphone, depending on how much charge is left on your battery. I did not test the unit with metering equipment, but I would say you should not plan that you will get more than three full charges from the fuel cell. The charging process is not instantaneous; it can take a minute or so before your device begins to receive a charge after activating the fuel cell. Also depending on the charge left on phone, you may need to let the internal battery charge for a bit before you are able to talk.

The charging cable that ships with the starter pack has a tip that works with standard Nokia phones. The starter kit includes four additional tips for USB, Mini USB, Micro USB and Palm Treo. Newer Nokia smart phones use a different tip. Tips for newer Nokia’s (E and N series) and others phones are available separately. Medis also sells a tip for iPhone/iPod, but the standard sync charger cable that came with my iPhone worked with the USB tip.

The fuel cell mid sized—it is small enough to throw in your travel bad, but too big to carry around in your pocket. Medis says fuel cell is should last for a year and half in the box and for three months after you activate it. These numbers are likely at the high end of the spectrum. Unless you have multiple trips in a relatively short time span, be careful about assuming the unit will still have a charge for subsequent trips. The starter kit box includes pre-addressed, but not prepaid, packaging to return the spent fuel cell back to the manufacturer for recycling. The fuel cell is CE and UL listed, RoHS compliant.

The Medis fuel cell is a potential solution for people who need to periodically recharge small electronics on an extended trip, but don’t have reliable access to power. Several online retailers carry the Medis fuel cell and refills. The starter kit retails for $50 and is available for around $38 street price and the replacement fuel cell retails for $30 and for around $24 street price. This means the Medis fuel cell is currently too expensive for regular use—an rechargeable extended alkaline battery pack would be more cost effective. The price of the fuel cell will likely drop over time and Medis says it is working on a refillable model, which should be more cost effective.

Newer Technology MAXPower 802.11n/g/b USB Adapter Review

Ben Gross — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:12:47 +0000

Even though all my desktop and laptop computers in recent memory have included built in WiFi support, I’ve become to appreciate that external WiFi adapters such as the Newer Technology MAXPower 802.11n/g/b USB Adapter are useful to keep around for troubleshooting wireless configurations, wireless scanning projects and as a quick fix to wireless adaptor failures, incompatibilities and problems with weak signals.

The MAXPower adaptor requires the installation of a driver and an associate application for wireless configuration. These are both straightforward to install. On MacOS X, the MAXPower unit does not use the built wireless scanning or configuration utilities, you must use the utilities provided with the adaptor. The form factor of the unit is compact, although if you have very little room between your USB connectors it could be a tight fit if you have other USB devices. A USB extension cable is included in the box along with a dock that makes it easy to place the wireless adaptor in a location with optimal reception. For individuals with marginal wireless reception this can make a difference.

The old saying that “the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from” is certainly true with WiFi. Not only are there four major 802.11 variants (A, B, G, and N) in reasonably wide use now, but there are also a variety of encryption mechanisms that often must be compatible for your wireless to work. In addition, many wireless vendors released early and slightly incompatible versions of their hardware and firmware prior to the official release of the standards. Needless to say, despite a vast amount of compatibility testing between vendors, things don’t always work right.

I began investigating USB wireless adaptors after listening to friends and colleagues complain about incompatibilities the experienced with certain hardware combinations. In particular, I had heard about incompatibilities between Apple machines running Mac OS X 10.5 and older 2Wire routers where the wireless connection would become unreliable and often fail altogether, especially when using encryption. The 2Wire units are combined DSL modems, routers and wireless access points that are common distributed by phone companies to home DSL users. Newer 2Wire units appear to have solved this problem. Solutions to this problem are haphazard at best and difficult to troubleshoot especially when the failing connection in question is the users primary machine making online research problematic. I typically recommend that people either purchase a new router or buy an external adaptor such as NewTech’s MaxPower for afflicted machines.

One tool that is particularly useful for troubleshooting wireless problems is KisMAC for OS X, inSSIDer for Windows Kismet for Linux and with some work, for Windows. You can find Windows Kismet binaries from CACE Technologies. For example, if you suspect that nearby wireless networks are causing interference problems, these utilities are an effective way to help you map out nearby 802.11 networks, including hidden networks. These tools can show you what channels the access points are operating on, the relative signal strengths. KisMac and Kismet can even help you plot access points with GPS if you are trying to cover a large area.

The MAXPower 802.11n/g/b USB Adapter uses the Ralink RT2870 chipset. Newer Technology advertises the device to work with Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher and Windows 2000 through Windows Vista. The most recent driver available from NewerTech is from December, 2007, however it appears to work fine with the latest Mac OS X 10.5.6 on both a MacBook Pro notebook and Mac Pro desktop. Ralink distributes current drivers for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux that you can download directly, but are likely to be unsupported by NewerTech.

Overall, I recommend the device. If you find yourself with wireless troubleshooting problems are weak signal, the MAXPower adaptor is an inexpensive solution that worked as advertised on both on Apple Macintosh and Windows machines. street price for the MAXPower 802.11n/g/b USB Adapter is about $40.

My apologies to NewerTech, I wrote this review some time ago. It got lost in the shuffle and never made it online. This version is updated from the original.

TripIt Shows the Value of Combining Email, Web and APIs

Ben Gross — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 05:40:35 +0000

TripIt is a free service that simplifies organizing travel plans. The service has done an excellent job of making it painless to aggregate the collection of email receipts that you receive from airlines, hotels, car rental companies and travel agencies into one master itinerary. In order to use TripIt, you simply forward any email receipts to plans [at] tripit [dot] com. The service extracts the reservation information from the message and assembles an attractive and very functional master itinerary from all the disparate documents. TripIt supplements the existing information with seating charts, information about local weather and events. Tripit supports a large number of travel-related vendors and regularly adds new ones based on demand.

I have been using TripIt for about a year and a half for both business and personal travel. TripIt provides many methods to access your travel information. There are three separate web-based interfaces–one for desktop browsers, one tuned specifically for the iPhone and one for other mobile web browsers. The service makes it possible to access your data via email, SMS, .ics calendar feeds and RSS feeds. TripIt recently added an Application Programming Interface (API) for developers that is rapidly expanding the number of options.

By default, trips are private. If you choose to add “connections” to other TripIt users, the service will then display trip basics including your destination and the dates you are traveling. You can choose to share trips and allow other individuals to view details such as flight and hotel information for a specific trip even if they are not TripIt users. You can also designate “collaborators” that make may changes or additions to an itinerary. While TripIt does have a number of social network features, these are not required to make the service useful for valuable.

Automatic account creation is one aspect of TripIt that illustrates how well email is integrated with the service. An account is created for you the first time you email TripIt a travel receipt. There is no need to go up through a separate sign up process, although you do have to assign a password the first time you log in.

One of my favorite talks from last year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco was “Making Email a Useful Web App” from Andy Denmark of TripIt. He made the argument that email is still interesting as an access point for web-based applications. He placed TripIt in a historical context of email driven applications such as the old email-based Internic domain registration forms. Denmark also mentioned TrackMyShipments, an online package tracking service, which is also email receipt-based. I like this service as well and will review it in the future.

The release of a TripIt developer API, immediately led to a number of useful connections to external service such as LinkedIn for sharing travel plans with business connections, Plaxo for integration with Plaxo Pulse and Plaxo Pulse, expens’d, which links with TripIt data to simplify travel expense reporting.

In some ways, TripIt competes with Dopplr, but in reality the services have minimal overlap and I think they are complimentary. Dopplr’s focus is on the social and visualization aspects of travel, while TripIt excels at many disparate travel documents and producing a useful master itinerary. I really look forward to the day when a developer connects these two services via their APIs.

I have very few complaints about TripIt, one is that it is difficult to retrieve older trips, which are sometimes useful when double checking records for expensing, etc. A brief history is available in the profile, otherwise you will need to find an old email from TripIt containing the URL from the trip to view the old itinerary.

The API connection potentially improves the situation for using your own historical TripIt records. That said, it would still be nice if TripIt created a way to easily view historical trips in the browser. This data is currently available in the calendar files and RSS feeds, but these are not convenient for most users to quickly look up a previous travel itinerary online. (Update: Thanks to a comment from TripIt’s Scott Hintz, I now see that the earlier trip history is available, just a little out-of-the-way. Thank you Scott.)

I have long wished that TripIt had a native iPhone application. The web-based iPhone interface is well done, but the master itinerary is also useful when I am without network connectivity such as on the plane or in a subway or when data is expensive such as on an international trip. This problem has effectively been solved with the release of the API as third party developers have begun to create applications that work with existing TripIt data.

There are now two travel applications for the iPhone that are able to sync with TripIt, FlightTrack Pro and TravelTracker. I have not yet seen applications for other mobile platforms such as BlackBerry or Android that will sync with TripIt data, but I would be surprised if the did not begin to appear up sooner than later.

The first application, FlightTrack Pro (iTunes Store link $9.99) is the big brother to the FlightTrack live flight tracking application. FlightTrack Pro can also synchronize flights with TripIt to automatically load upcoming trip information. The application includes features that appeal most to frequent fliers including arrival and departure times, aircraft type and flight maps. The application can download current information on flight status, any delays or cancellations and weather conditions over the air. FlightTrack Pro caches this information so you can review the details even after you are in the air and offline.

The second application, TravelTracker (iTunes Store link $1.99) is an iPhone application helps to track the large and small details related to travel such as airline, car and hotel reservations, frequent flyer account numbers. TravelTracker has a long heritage as it has been available for Palm OS since 1998. The application contains a number of internal databases including airports, Amtrak stations and a number of customizable shopping, packing and sightseeing list related to travel. TravelTracker includes the ability to keep track of expenses and includes a large number of default categories to select from. The application provides links to the internal browser to look up flight information, airport maps and seating charts.

TravelTracker provides several options for importing and exporting data. The application supports emailing itineraries as plain text, html or CSV. Users can independently backup or restore TravelTracker data via a desktop helper application. There were Windows and Mac OS9 desktop companion applications for the PalmOS version of TravelTracker. There is currently no stand-alone desktop applications that are compatible with the iPhone version.

The developer of TravelTracker makes a separate application called Flight Update ($5) that provides real-time flight information, which will hopefully also gain TripIt support in the future. If the user has them installed, TravelTracker would benefit from providing links to either Flight Update or FlightTrack as both are significantly more usable than switching to the built-in browser to look up information.

Third party iPhone applications are not allowed to access entries from the iPhone calendar, so neither FlightTrack Pro nor TravelTracker can place entries directly into your calendar on the iPhone. As a practical matter, this is not really a problem. TripIt provides its own .ics calendar feed that you can subscribe to from desktop calendars such as iCal or Outlook or from web-based calendars such as Google Calendar or the Hotmail Calendar.

* Minor corrections, URL, and pricing updates September, 13, 2010.

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Automagic search and replace for spreadsheets

Ben Gross — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:17:31 +0000

If you have ever received an a spreadsheet in email that you realize needs a series of repetitive changes that could take a mind numbing hour or more to fix, this new service might interest you. Magic/Replace from Dabble DB is billed as “Data Cleanup for Everyone” and the service does a pretty good job at just that.

The free online tool will let you do “automagic” search and replace operations on data in a spreadsheet. Effectively, the tool works by example. You import your tabular data (CSV, TSV or XLS) and then make changes any changes you want to a single row of data. You will then see those of changes propagated across a preview of your data. Click submit and it will transform all your data for you and send an email where you can download the new data set.

The service is compelling since it will let you easily make the kinds of transformations that can be a serious pain if you are not a regular expression expert. For example, Magic/Replace makes it easily to normalize, combine, reorder or split columns or reformat a column of phone numbers from (555)/5551212 to 555-555-1212. There is almost no user interface to speak of, which is impressive in itself. The site has a nice two-minute tutorial video that does a good job of explaining the features.

My favorite iPhone clients for IM, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious

Ben Gross — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:09:51 +0000

I have found social services such as IM, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious to be very useful on mobile devices. In general, I prefer native mobile applications to web-based mobile applications for their speed and usability.

Beejive IM (App Store link)
Cost: $16
Beejive is a multi-protocol IM client for mobile devices. Bejive version is well-established. In addition to a well established BlackBerry client, Beejive makes a native iPhone client, a web-based iPhone client a Windows Mobile client in beta. The software is more expensive than the average iPhone software although in my experience Beejive is far and away the best mobile IM application. The application is responsive, relatively quick to connect and the user interface is well done. Beejive will cache your connections so that switching in and out of the application does not cause you to disconnect on the iPhone. There is a hack to use Mobile Me to notify you of incoming messages when you are in another application. This hack should be unnecessary once Apple releases the official notification mechanism. My primary gripe is that it does not automatically use existing address book information to attach names to AIM users. If you do not make frequent use of IM from your mobile device it might not be worth the cost. IM+ is a free alternative that is not nearly as nice, but is certainly fine for light use.

Facebook (App Store link)
Cost: free
With the 2.0 release of the Facebook iPhone application (not the web version) most of the limitations of the previous version were removed. It’s not perfect, but it has a nice user interface and is well done overall. It is fast enough to work well over EDGE and allows you to access most features and data you might want including the news feed, notifications, photos, and friend management. There are enough different views for it to be useful. If you use Facebook regularly and you have an iPhone the application is well worth a download.

Twittelator Pro (App Store link)
Cost: $5 (non-pro version free)
Twittelator is a native iPhone Twitter client. There are many competitors although I prefer Twittelator’s user interface and feature set. Twittelator allows you to quickly look at different segments such as friends, replies, everyone, and trending topics. The application supports multiple Twitter and Identi.ca accounts, search, location enhanced features, copy and paste and bookmarking people for quick access and a fair amount of customization. My main gripe is that it does not have an explicit direct messages view. I found I preferred Twittelator to Twitterific or Twinkle.

MyDelicious (App Store link)
Cost: $1.99
MyDelicious is a native Delicious client. It supports searches, tags and offline use. Bookmarks are automatically resynchronized on startup and individual entries can be viewed in either a built-in browser or Safari. Three levels of detail are supported in the views to maximize the amount of information on the screen. I preferred MyDelicious to the Bookmarks Delicious application.

New at noteworthy from the Mobile 2.0 SF conference

Ben Gross — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 04:49:33 +0000

The Mobile 2.0 San Francisco conference was held on November 3rd, 2008. This year’s event featured a single business track in the morning and added a second “builder” track targeted at developers in the afternoon.

Two of my favorite presentations from the event were both from the builder track, Markus Spiering’s talk on Yahoo! Blueprint and Barbara Ballard’s presentation on designing mobile applications. Dennis Bournique of WAPReview posted a nice two part write up of the conference: part 1 and part 2. VentureBeat has a brief summary of the startups that presented at Mobile 2.0.

About a week and a half before the Mobile 2.0 conference berlinblase did an interview with Tim O’Reilly about his take on Mobile 2.0 in general. Tony Fish from the Mobile 2.0 event argues with Tim’s premise in the comments. During the event, Stuart Henshall raved about Qik and gave an impromptu demo using the new iPhone client. He posted a review QIK - Mobile Video Streaming about a week before the event.

Markus Spiering presented a tutorial on Yahoo! Blueprint in the builder track. Blueprint is interesting as it can generate mobile HTML/XHTML web-based applications, standalone mobile applications for Java, Windows Mobile and Symbian as well as widgets for Yahoo! Go from a single source. This covers the vast majority of mobile phones capable of running applications. Yahoo says that it is in talks with Apple to allow it to also generate runtimes for the iPhone in a way that does not violate the iPhone terms of service. Yahoo! has used Blueprint for a number of its own services and applications including oneSearch, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Go 3.0 and oneConnect.

Barbara Ballard of Little Springs Design gave a nice presentation titled
The Full Web Isn’t: Mobility Goes Beyond the desktop which she uploaded to SlideShare. The deck has a nice set of examples showing four variations of an expense reporting applications: a full-web version, one with simple mobile customizations, one with more intelligent mobile design and a widgetized version. The presentation shows that there are clear benefits to redesigning the application specifically for the mobile device.

Common Craft explanatory videos for current topics

Ben Gross — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:45:16 +0000

Common Craft produces online videos to explain current technology in an accessible and entertaining way. Their videos are an excellent way to easily point colleagues, family and friends at concise descriptions of technical advances. Common craft also sells licenced versions of their videos for corporate training. Previously, Common Craft produced custom videos (many of which are archived on their site), but now focus on producing their own videos.

Here are a number of videos that are likely to be of interest to Messaging News readers.

Review of the Pingdom uptime monitoring service

Ben Gross — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:59:25 +0000

Pingdom is a web-based uptime monitoring service that is inexpensive and straightforward to set up. Pingdom offers continuous monitoring of the availability of your online services, notification of failures, notification of service resumption and analytics for availability data. Both email and SMS notifications are available.

The service supports checking HTTP, HTTPS, ping, SMTP, POP and IMAP as well as arbitrary TCP and UDP ports. The service can authenticate against password protected web pages as well as send and expect strings for each port checked. Pingdom maintains a distributed set of machines in order to conduct tests from multiple points on the network.

Pingdom supports time resolutions of 1, 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minute for checks. As with all monitoring services, there is a tradeoff between the resolution of availability checks and the likelihood of spurious notifications. Services that have monitoring requirements for sub-minute checks would be advised to invest in their own monitoring infrastructure or investigate services that specialize in that kind of uptime monitoring.

Pingdom provides an option for public reports. Service providers can opt to publish their reports publicly report on the heath of their service. One interesting point to keep in mind is that these could be any services, even those of your competitors. Pingdom reports include information on both uptime and response time. Depending on the details of the contract, I believe Pingdom could be used to verify and make claims from a network service provider’s SLA. The Pingdom Web service API is available to subscribers who wish to either integrate Pingdom data into a custom application or web site.

Royal Pingdom is the company’s blog which regularly has interesting content about availability issues around the internet and network management issues.

Pingdom is priced at $10 a month for monitoring five individual services and 20 included SMS messages and $40 a month for thirty services and 200 SMS messages. Additional SMS message blocks are available and addition checks are $0.50 a month. Pingdom is inexpensive for business use, however it’s likely too expensive for most personal use. After several months as a subscriber to the service, I can recommend it.

iPhone SSH clients reviewed: iSSH, pTerm, and TouchTerm

Ben Gross — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:42:50 +0000

SSH is the de facto way to establish a secure connection with a command line interface. It is an essential too for people who regularly manage Unix servers, networking gear, and a variety of other devices.

There are now three SSH clients that will work on any iPhone or iPod Touch with access to the iPhone App Store. It is true that iPhone SSH clients have been available early on for jailbroken iPhones, but the new clients are available on non-jailbroken iPhones.

Currently, there is no clear winner as each SSH client has its own tradeoffs and none are ideal. Since they are all likely to be revised quickly, if you absolutely need one right now, buy whichever one has the functionality you need. These SSH clients would all be maddening for long term use, but have great potential for emergency fixes, monitoring, and just running a few commands without needing access to a computer and a network.

The developers of each of these SSH clients have submitted updates that will be available as soon as they go through the App Store approval process, most likely in the next week or two. The good thing is that each of the apps is inexpensive and show promise. All three developers seem responsive. I’ll write an updated post after the updates for all three apps (and if there are newcomers) are released.

I used a recent version OpenSSH sshd running on FreeBSD and on Linux for testing.

Some commonalities across clients:

All worked in both portrait and landscape mode
All support a default 80x24 terminal in portrait mode
All supported saving at least the hostname and nickname for future session reuse
All worked with color ls
I was able to bring up and use (to some extent) Pine and Emacs on each
Each client allowed access to the built in iPhone keyboard that supports most meta characters you might need including tilde, pipe, brackets, angle brackets, ampersands, and asterisks.
None of the clients supported an alt key, meta key, or an explicit break key.
No esc key, but can use Ctrl-[
All will work on iPhone/iPod Touch with access to the App Store and 2.0 firmware or higher
All with work with Wi-Fi and EDGE/3G(HSDPA)
None of the clients supported host-based public key authentication, ssh-agent, or port forwarding.

iSSH (App Store)

by: Zinger-Soft
Price $4.99
Version tested: 1.0
Size: 525.1kb

iSSH Overview

I found iSSH to be the nicest to work with overall for the current crop. It edged out the others because of the widest terminal emulation support and its use of the touch screen for arrow keys, which I found to make a much better user experience especially with Pine and Emacs. Another nice touch swiping up (up arrow) would allow you to scroll back through your command history. iSSH is based off the open source PuTTY client like pTerm.

The account screen includes fields for Description, host, login (username), and an optional command to run on login. The password is requested after each connect.

iSSH the Good

Widest range of terminal emulation support: VT100, VT102, VT220, ANSI, xterm, and xterm-color
Nice use of the touchscreen to emulate arrow keys and to handle scrollback without scrollbars
Keyboard allows for Ctrl, shift, Function keys, the tab key worked and allowed for command completion
Developer seems responsive. Has a support forum on Google Groups

iSSH the Bad

No alt, meta, or escape keys although Ctrl-[ worked in place of esc.
Does not show a session key fingerprint. It’s unclear if it actually caches the session key or not.
No way to delete a session you have created
Canceling an SSH session is slow
Supports screen rotation, but the screen rotation causes existing text on the screen to be covered up.
Finding the correct position on the screen to delete or edit existing sessions is difficult
No online manual
No support for non-default SSH ports
Was not smart enough to know when the terminal session ended, you have to hit the exit button
Has an exit session button, but it can take a long time to quite an existing session
When adding a configuration the first character of each entry defaulted to having the caps lock on.

pTerm (App Store)

by: Instant Cocoa (Eric Maland)
Price: $4.99
Version tested: 1.1
Size: 494.4kb

pTerm Overview

pTerm was the second official iPhone SSH client out the door. The client supports SSH, Telnet, and raw socket (TCP) connections with Xterm terminal emulation. Like iSSH, pTerm is also based off of the PuTTY code base.

When you create a new account in the client, it has fields for nickname, host and port, which means you have to put the username in each session.

Upon initial connect, presents key fingerprint and allows you to cache host keys. You can accept once or permanently as with standard desktop clients. I did not test what would happen if the host key changed and there does not seem to be a way to delete saved keys.

As with the other clients it support both portrait and landscape modes, you can double click to make keyboard appear and disappear.

Can pinch to zoom in and out although it was a bit difficult to find the right size sometimes. A few automatic settings might be nicer.

Color ls, Pine, and emacs worked, but lack of arrow keys was annoying and limited their utility.

pTerm the Good

Has terminal emulation (only Xterm)
Supports SSH as well as Telnet and raw sockets
Shows key fingerprint on connect
Can edit account information
Supports pinching and zooming
Supports scrolling to emulate larger screen area

pTerm the Bad

Terminal emulation limited to Xterm
Text did not automatically reflow around keyboards so you will likely have to scroll the text in order to see the command line if you want to type
Only control key. No specific alt, meta, tab, arrow keys, page up, page down, break, or function keys
No history buffer
Does not remember session usernames
Pinching and zooming seems a bit finicky

TouchTerm (App Store)

by: jbrink.net
Price: $2.99
Size: 878.7kb
Version tested: 1.1.517

TouchTerm Overview

TouchTerm was the first official iPhone SSH client in the App Store. The client is based on OpenSSH and OpenSSL rather than putty like pTerm and iSSH. Currently TouchTerm is the most customizable. You can change screen colors (foreground, background, cursor) in addition to the font size.

I found TouchTerm was my least favorite in terms of user input. There is an odd input box that effectively added another step each time you wanted to type. The box would occlude the screen and then disappear after you typed your text. TouchTerm was the only client with a clear screen button.

Color ls, Pine, and emacs worked surprisingly, but lack of terminal emulation makes it far less practical.

TouchTerm the Good

Can edit session information
Can save session password
Extensive online manual and release notes
Button to show command history
Soft keys for clear, control, tab, esc.
Supports pinch and zoom
Supports scrolling to emulate larger screen area

TouchTerm the Bad

Only supports saving one session
No exit button, so you have to exit and renter the application to start a new session.
No support for alt/meta, or function keys.
Pinch and zoom was a little finicky
No preset font sizes