Andrew Maxwell

This morning Intel announced that they will be buying McAfee anti-virus software for $7.68 billion.

This may be a lot of money, but I believe that this is a great move on Intel’s part. Internet speeds are getting faster, hackers are getting smarter and currently all anti-virus software is somewhat reactive rather than being defensive. Bringing anti-virus protecting to the hardware can add an even stronger barrier of entry for viruses to get on your computer, add software anti-virus protection on top of that and you’ve got a very secure machine.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Intel owning McAfee is a good move and do you think it will actually help us as the end user?

To find out more read the PCMag article - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368009,00.asp

I get a lot of feedback from my blog posts, most of it doesn’t come from this website, but rather from Google Buzz. [Read the rest of this entry...]

July 21st, 2010 Evernote released a new section on their website dedicated to their server maintenance. When I saw this it made me very happy, not just because it was a new Evernote feature, but because Evernote is one of the few companies that tries to keep an open communications with their users at all times.

What does this mean?
Well this means that when Evernote needs to update, take down or do some general maintenance on their servers we can find out when this is happening. This is also useful for the rare times that the website or your mobile devices are having troubles connecting to Evernote, with a quick look at their server maintenance page you can find out if the problem is related to Evernote or to your hardware.

Last week I bought my first Android cell phone, the Samsung Captivate. The first thing I did when I got the phone was check out the Android Marketplace (this is also known as the app store to some). The marketplace is great but it could use quite a bit of upgrades.

Below you will find a list of things that I think should get addressed in order to make the marketplace a better service. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Microsoft recently created a new text editor called Bend. This may sound of little importance but take a look at some of these screen shots, the thing looks pretty slick, especially coming from Microsoft. This text editor looks different than other editors with its minimal design and better font rendering. I personally don’t know if I would give up NotePad++ for Bend, but if they added plug-ins for HTML and other languages that I code with I would give it a longer trial.

Give bend a test drive and let me know what you think.

Yesterday Google announced that one of their social platforms, Google Wave, will be shut down. Google Wave was a great product in terms of being on the cutting edge with features such as bots, real time collaboration, playback and more. But with these strengths came many weaknesses.

As a designer and developer I see and use many websites on a daily basis and some of these websites are easier to use than others and Google Wave was on the “harder to use” spectrum of this list. Just to post a new wave took some thought, this may not have required a lot of thought but it did require some in comparison to e-mail or your favorite social media website and replying to a post was even more difficult. After a while I was able to catch on to the interface but by then I found little reason to use Wave besides as a gimmicky tool.

We have already started to see some of the great features from Google Wave make its way into other products such as Google Docs and Google Sites. I hope that Google learned a lot from Wave and that maybe in the future we will see the playback function move into Gmail where I think it belongs.

Let me know what you think about the death of Google Wave and what features from Wave would you like to see in other services.

Recently Evernote came out with a great feature called the “Trunk”. This feature is basically an app store for Evernote. Well if you have an iPad, mobile phone, netbook or any other kind of mobile device you probably can’t get access to the Trunk, or if you can it is limited due to the size of your device.

As of this morning I found a way to get around that issue. If you go to http://www.evernote.com/about/trunk/

You get full access to the Trunk and all of it’s features on any web enabled device.

Since I started to do freelance full time I have noticed that I can easily get distracted by simple things, like checking social media sites, reading emails, writing emails, switching projects and before it became a habit I wanted to stop it, and make sure that I am focused.

[Read the rest of this entry...]