brilliantdays.com

I have 5 invites for the beta of Mailplane, the gmail app that is just as cool as gmail in a browser. With support for multiple accounts and lots of other nifty things. Post a comment below, just remember to put your e-mail address in the right field. These are not visible for others than me.

I just ordered iWork ‘08 from Apple. When you get the confirmation e-mail, there’s a tracking number. In Europe, Apple use TNT, but the TNT web page was crap (I couldn’t even find a tracker search box!). So I downloaded the Delivery status widget. Amazing piece of software!!

When you enter a tracking number, it has options for how often it should check. And it supports Growl. So now I know that my iWork-package is at Heathrow, and once an hour Delivery Status will alert me with Growl. Just brilliant.

Delivery Status supports just about any way to deliver a package there is (except pigeons):

- Adobe.com (US and Canada)
- Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.co.jp, Amazon.de, Amazon.at, and Amazon.fr
- Apple.com (including all international stores)
- Canada Post (Postes Canada)
- DHL (US and Germany)
- FedEx and FedEx SmartPost
- Google Checkout
- Nintendo (US and Canada)
- Purolator
- TNT
- UPS and UPS Mail Innovations
- USPS (United States Postal Service)

As you can see, the Apple.com tracker just shows that the package is shipped, and no details apart from that. So you need to set up a special tracker for TNT or similar.

Try iWork for free

There’s a 30 day fully working trial version of iWork ‘08 for download at Apple. I just would like to mention a few highlights: Pages opens AND saves Word documents. The new Numbers app is something as self-contradicting as a cool spreadsheet app! And Keynote has a new, better masking features, animation and new effects.

Some days ago a friend of mine invited me to Yamky, a social website I didn’t know about.

I’m always interested in social media sites, so I registered and made a profile. I register for just about everything there is out there, to figure out what’s good and what’s not good.

So I entered my gmail info to check which of my OTHER FRIENDS were on Yamky. BUT - I didn’t read the text well enough.

The result: Yamky e-mailed over 800 people an invite in my name! Bad. Bad. Bad.

So for the ones who read my site here: Sorry.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Big mistake from me.

I never invite people to sites like this, except for an few other friends that are just as interested in stuff like this as I am.

Sorry!

(Kitten by Trang Vuong)

Sorry again.

The worst about this is that it e-mailed people I can’t imagine would use a site like Yamky.

It’s a very bad interface that just sends out so many invites without letting you check off which ones you want and which you don’t want.

And I should had read things better. My intention was never to invite anyone, just check if someone I know already was using Yamky.

Yamky seems to have quite a presence of people interested in… how do I say that… mating? So if that’s ok with you, go ahead.

Yep. After watching people fight it out at Scoble, we figured we could end the fight right here. So here’s how to get a bigger screen on Nokia N95 than iPhone.

(RSS subscribers may need to click through to the video)

One thing missing though - have a look at the end of the video - no multitouch.

Full instructions at NRKbeta.

After a busy night in SF, I just would like to state the two very important rules for pirates:

#2: One eyepatch good, two eyepatches very bad.

#1: Too much Rum make you forget rule #2

Skitch is a brand new app for uploading of pictures. “Heh, I need an app for that??”, you might say. Yes, you do. Because Skitch do it in ways you wouldn’t believe. It looks amazing, behaves like it has a Nobel Prize-brain, and the icon is sweet.

Check out the 3 minutes entry video which says it all:

Then go grab a semi-public beta at Colin Devroe, or just wait a few hours until it’s public beta.

In a few hours, I’m off to the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. A whole week of unlimited Mac fun, learning, meetups, sessions, labs, meeting people and seeing San Francisco for the first time. If you’re there and would like to meet, call me. Or use the contact form. Or the comments below. I’m brilliantdays at AIM, oyvindsolstad at Skype and sol24 at Yahoo.

I’m especially interested in Mac apps for productivity and digital creation (video, graphics, sound). I will be posting about everything here at brilliantdays, in English. And at NRKbeta in Norwegian. Also, I’ll be twittering if you’re into that. Finally, here’s my Facebook badge:

WWDC links

Here are some useful links if you’re off to WWDC.

Apple’s official WWDC site
Attendee WWDC login
Moscone Center website
Moscone West floor plans
Moscone West on Google Maps (street view)

I did a presentation at Rose d’Or (also know as the Golden Rose) in Lucerne at tuesday. “Trends in mobile TV”, at Grand Casino, Casineum 7. May from 13.00-15.00.

The Rose d’Or (or Golden Rose) is a highly prestigious television award, given annually since 1961 at the Festival Rose d’Or in spring each year. Since 2004, the festival has been held in Lucerne, Switzerland. Before the festival was held in Montreux, Switzerland, thus the Golden Rose of Montreux.

(from Wikipedia entry on Rose d’Or)

The festival also has seminars and presentations on different subjects. This year monday is internet day, tuesday mobile day, and wednesday covers “How to create and produce world class entertainment televison?” and “Scripted formats: A new era”.

My presentation

I will also post from other interesting presentations at Rose d’Or. Come back here for updates later this week.

Feel free to contact me in Lucerne. I’ve made a Rose d’Or group at Facebook. And guess what: No one else has joined. Heh. Now how could that be? TV-people don’t use social sites like Facebook?

Pictures

I’ve put up pictures of the other speakers at Flickr. I will post about their actual presentations too, as soon as I have typed everything and sorted my pictures. Some very interesting days.

…you will never have success. I read this at Guy Kawasaki’s blog today:

What do you think would have happened if founders listened to pre-release comments about selling used printers online (eBay), creating the tenth search engine (Google), building personal computers for hobbyists (Apple), enabling people to tell their friends that their cat rolled over (Twitter), or rating whether people are good looking (HotorNot)?

And…

If you believe in something, go for it. This is the only way to really find out. Mathematically, the naysayers are right 95% of the time, but believing you’re in the 5% is what makes entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs.

Trust your instincts. You will fall on your face quite a few times, but that’s learning too. Without falling over lots of times, you’ll never learn to run.

If you’re Norwegian, head over to NRKbeta to see posts about gadgets and techonolgy. NRKbeta is NRK’s (NRK at Wikipedia) new technology site. Our tagline: “NRKs sandkasse for teknologi, duppeditter, nye medier og alt annet som er viktig i livet.”

In English, that would be something like “NRK’s new “sandbox” for all technology, gadgets, new media and other important things in life.” Have a look or subscribe to the NRKbeta feed.

I’m the daily editor, so if it sucks, I’m the one to blame. Feel free to tell me if it does (also if it doesn’t I might add…) We’ve just started so expect things to speed up the next weeks, it’s a little slow and thin at the moment. But hey, it’s a beta!