If your home Wi-Fi network is like most people’s, you’re probably not getting the very best performance you can out of it. Easy and inexpensive enhancements, such as adding an access point or a simple cycled reboot, can make a world of difference. Also, even small changes within the house, such as the addition of an obstruction to your Wi-Fi signal, can slow things down. In this post, I’ll round up a list of quick checkup tasks you can do on a regular basis to make sure your network is optimized.
Consider adding access points. In response to a long post I did on Wi-Fi a few months ago, many readers said that they use only a router to send their Wi-Fi signal around their home—no access points. Wi-Fi is radio technology, which means your router’s signal decays with distance. Often, adding just one access point (use the same brand as your router) at a cost well under $100, will radically increase the roaming performance you get. This is especially true if you live in a large home.
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There are reasons why user interfaces like Apple’s “Cover Flow” are popular. Most people are pretty good at pattern recognition, so having little pictures of things to recognize makes sense; it’s easier to find what you’re looking for by flipping through pictures than by scanning a list of text entries. Plus, let’s face it, many of us are magpies at heart: we enjoy shiny things. Cover Flow-style interfaces provide an easy and fun way to sort through large volumes of information and find the piece you want at any given time.
It’s not surprising that people have been trying to apply similar visual metaphors to web browsing for quite some time. Dedicated “3D browsers” like Browse3D and SpaceTime have been around for years, offering ways to capture multiple web pages and flip between them. But these have remained very much niche applications, in part because they can’t hope to match any of the mainstream browsers in features. Lately, however, I’ve seen three examples of this sort of visual browsing interface implemented within other browsers, which offer a more likely way for most users to experiment.
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If web site bookmarking is something you do day in and day out, there’s a new bookmarking tool you need to add to your browser – Instapaper (via TechCrunch). The side project of Marco Arment, creator of the very cool micro-blogging service Tumbir, Instapaper is online bookmarking that gets out of your way so you can bookmark the way you need to when you spend your working day on the web.
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After a recent post I did on miniature Mac applications small enough to store on a USB thumb drive, I got a lot of suggestions for alternatives. I’ve tried several of them and found them useful. In this post I’ll round up more small-footprint applications that are very practical to keep with you on your pocket USB thumb drive (I keep my little drive on a keychain).
An FTP application is ideal to keep on a pocket USB drive, because then you can move files too large for e-mail—even long video files—to colleagues or a remote machine with ease. Cyberduck (see above) is a free, open-source application that can do either FTP or SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) transfers. Unlike a lot of FTP programs, it integrates with a number of Mac OS X’s built-in features. For example, there is a Spotlight importer for bookmark files, and synchronizing remote directories with local ones will feel familiar to any regular Mac user.
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There’s an amazing variety of software out there designed to make us more productive, with more coming along every day. Some of it is free and open source, but there are still plenty of commercial applications trying to separate you from your hard-earned money as well. Even “free” productivity software comes with a cost, as it takes time to set up and can lock you in to a new data format or a particular workflow that makes it hard to switch when something new comes along.
We try to steer you towards the best and most interesting new software in our reviews. No matter how many reviews you read, though, sometimes the package that looked so perfect on the shelf turns out to be a disaster when you install it. Why not take a minute today to share your worst software mistake with other WWD readers? What program did you buy and install, only to never actually use it because it was too complex or didn’t work the way you wanted? What proved to be underpowered or overpromised? Which applications do you wish you’d never installed? You may never get your money (or time) back, but here’s your chance to blow off a little steam.
Sidebar for Google Docs – That’s what you’ll get if you install gDocsBar (at least if you’re running Firefox). Reboot your browser, and you get a nice tabbed sidebar that shows what you have stored in Google Documents, offers one-click access to your existing documents, and hooks into Google’s search features (useful if you have a whole lot of documents).
gDocsBar also offers drag-and-drop file uploading, with SSL and Firefox Password Manager credential management. Alas, it’s not yet compatible with Firefox 3, but works well in Firefox 2.
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A while back I did a post on alternative search engines, which can sometimes help you get the results you want faster than Google can. As evidence, though, that Google itself is interested in alternative ways to search the web, the company has announced an interesting set of new, experimental search tools. You can try them now.
The new experimental search approaches range from timeline- and map-based ways to present search results, to new keyboard shortcuts, to results that include alternative keyword suggestions and relevancy rankings. For certain kinds of searches, they do appear to save some time and produce better organized results.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
