Marco Polo

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There have been a lot of apps kind of like it over the years, but I’m finding myself increasing drawn to video messaging using the Marco Polo app. It calls itself a “video walkie talkie”, which is pretty accurate. It’s not a live video chat app like Skype or Google Hangouts, but instead you can send a quick video message to a friend and they can respond back with a quick video message of their own.

It feels similar to Snapchat, but with one major difference: your messages do not

disappear. While the ephemeral nature of Snapchat can be appealing, it can also be frustrating to lose photos or videos that you may have wanted to save.

Marco Polo has been around for a few years, but it really started exploding in popularity last October. A friend encouraged me to join a few weeks ago and I was amazed at how many of my other friends were already using the service.

The app is intentionally quite simple. There are a few filters you can add and you can add text on top of your video, but it’s essentially just “tap to record” and it sends automatically as soon as you’re done. It makes for quick, easy video messages to one another.

Aside from one-on-one conversations, you can also create groups. We have a group for GreenMellen (though I think it’s unlikely to gain as much traction as Slack has for us) and my daughter created a group for our family. I could see some value in some other groups as well, but we’ll see what happens.

You can find it for iOS here and for Android here.

You should be using Google Photos

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Over the past decade, Google has released a number of “dud” products, but some of those products lead to awesome additions in other ways.

The oldest example is with Google Wave, the “email replacement” collaboration tool. It never took off and is long dead, but brought the amazing real-time “everybody type at the same time in the same document” features to Google Docs.

Another Google product has a similar history. While Google+ isn’t completely dead yet, it’s been scaled back a lot and will never be as big as Google once hoped. However, inside of Google+ was a brilliant photo system that is a standalone product you should all be using — Google Photos. Here’s why:

Free

First, it’s free for unlimited photos. You’re “limited” to 15 megapixel images, but that’s more than enough for anyone but the most serious photographer. My wife has more than 50,000 images in Google Photos and it doesn’t cost us a cent.

Cross-platform

It works on most major platforms. It’s available for iPhone, Android and you can browse it on the web from any computer. This also means that if you change phones (whether it’s another iPhone/Android, or if you switch platforms completely) all of your photos are perfectly safe.

Auto-upload

On your phone you can set it to automatically upload all of your new photos and videos. Better yet, you can tell it to only upload when you’re on wifi so that it doesn’t use up your data.

Free up space

Since Google automatically uploads all of your photos to the web, you don’t necessarily need to keep them on your phone eating up space. In late 2015 they added a simple option to “free up space”, which will delete every photo from your phone that has already been safely backed up. This Lifehacker post explains it further in-depth.

Assistant

They have a fun feature in the Google Photos assistant (formerly called “auto-awesome”) that does neat things with your photos. For example I shot a series of still photos in burst mode, and Google automatically put them together into an animation:

Easy to leave

Last, it’s easy to leave. As I explained in my Brand Loyalty is a Bad Thing post, Google makes it easy to leave. If you decide there is a better solution out there, you can head over to Google Takeout and download all of your photos in one shot. Google Photos is an amazing product that I’ll likely continue to use for a long time, but I appreciate that they make it easy to leave if you find something better.

Do you use Google Photos for your images? If not, what do you prefer?

Brand loyalty is a bad thing

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Over the years I’ve worked hard to keep my digital life in a place where I can freely move from device to device without worrying about being too locked in to one system. Lifehacker wrote an article that summed it up perfectly: Brand loyalty is for suckers.

You tend to hear this most often with Apple. Here’s an image from the Lifehacker article:

There is certainly nothing wrong with using Apple products. They make excellent phones, and certainly the best (and most expensive) laptops on the planet. It’s when you get locked into their ecosystem to the point of not being able to leave that things get tricky.

Here are some examples:

Phones

When the iPhone first came out, I was enamoured. I wanted one. It took about a year, but I finally got one. The next year I waited in line for hours to get a new iPhone 3GS for myself and my wife.

However, Android came out before the first iPhone was even announced, and it seemed likely that it would be a better fit for me eventually. A few years later, it was. I switched. I had already moved my contacts over to Google, so the transition wasn’t too bad.

While I’m a huge fan of the new Google Pixel, it’s entirely possible that I’ll move back to iPhone one day. I think Android is better right now, but if I someday think Apple is better I’ll happily move back over.

Cell Networks

The same is true with cell networks. In 2016 I actually used three different providers.

I started the year at Verizon, who I still think have the best network. The pricing was just getting out of control, so I moved over to T-Mobile. I saved over 50% with that move, though the network is a bit lacking. Their network is quite impressive around Atlanta (even better than Verizon, I think), but it simply disappears outside of town. Driving to Florida last year, we had zero signal for about 1/3 of the trip.

After the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, I switched over to Project Fi (explained here) and it’s worked very well.

Computers

Computers are another area where I like to keep my options open. I’m writing this from a Windows 10 desktop (which I love), but I can write from pretty much any web browser.

I’m really becoming drawn to some of the Google Chromebooks, as I can do about 95% of my work on them. As I mentioned above, I still completely believe that Macbooks are the best laptops you can buy. However, when looking at my Chromebook R13 post, the price is hard to ignore. That is a very nice Chromebook, and at $350 it’s roughly 1/10 the cost of a high-end Macbook. The Chromebooks we bought for our kids last year were $108 each and are still going strong.

Chromebooks wouldn’t work well for the designers on our team, as having access to the Adobe Creative Cloud software (Photoshop, InDesign, etc) is essential. For most of us, though, they can do anything you need.

My point again is to keep your options open. Drop me in front of a Windows computer, a Mac, or a Chromebook, and I’ll be able to do most of what I need to do.

Photos

Google Photos is an amazing product. You can store all of your photos in there for free, and it syncs automatically with your phone. It alone helps keep your options open (can work with iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever), but it also keeps its own options open with Google Takeout.

Google Takeout is one of the big reasons I tend to prefer Google products. You can argue about the amount of data that they collect, but they make it very easy to get all of that data back out. Microsoft is bad about that, and Apple is awful, but Google gives you one-click access to grab all of your info and move it elsewhere.

This is the power of Google Photos. It’s a phenomenal product that I’ll likely use for a long time, but if that changes I can grab all of my photos out of there in a single file and put them wherever I want.

Notes

I used Evernote for a long time and I was a huge fan of theirs, but have recently moved away from it. I’m now using Google Keep and it’s a great solution for me. As with Google Photos, though, all of my Google Keep notes can be quickly exported via Google Takeout, so I’ll only use it for as long as I think it’s the best.

I love Android. I like Windows. You might love Apple. All are great. Just keep your options open and don’t be a sucker.

Where desktop computers still win

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I was going through some old blog posts a few days ago and realized that I purchased my current home desktop computer more than seven years ago and it’s still running strong. I credit that largely to the fact that it’s a desktop with room for expansion, and not a laptop where things are quite limited. Here’s a photo taken not too long after I had set it up back in 2009:

It looks a bit different now (replaced the smaller monitor on the right), but from the outside it’s mostly the same — it’s the inside that has changed quite a bit over the years.

This is where desktop computers shine: a colleague of mine recently had the video board on her Macbook die and that was pretty much the end of the Macbook. Macbook video boards are soldered onto the main board, and thus the entire laptop was essentially dead. Just shy of $4,000 later, she’s up and running again with a sweet new Macbook.

Conversely, I’ve upgraded the video card on the desktop a few times over the years to help it keep up. In fact, I’ve done a number of upgrades to it.

Video card: I started with two cards to handle the three monitors, later moved to a single Radeon 5770 to handle the load, and recently replaced that with a GeForce GTX 1060. The cards aren’t cheap, but they’re much less expensive than replacing the entire computer.

Hard drive: A few years ago I switched out the hard drive for an SSD (solid state drive), which runs around 10x faster. If you’ve ever used a computer with an SSD, you know how very fast they can be.

Memory: I initially purchased the computer with 8GB of RAM, but upgraded to 16GB earlier this year.

Windows: The computer came with Windows 7, I skipped Windows 8, and now I’m using Windows 10 and it’s working great.

The only part that is rather difficult to upgrade is the main processor, since you typically need a new motherboard to go with it (which then may cause some of your other pieces to need replacement). I focused the initial purchase on a fast processor so that I wouldn’t need to replace it, with the thought of replacing other parts along the way to keep it moving fast. So far, so good!

My computer at the office is quite similar. Here’s an old post with a bit more about that one and below is a photo:

My wife is in need of a new computer for her office at the house, and I’m thinking I’ll go with a full-size desktop for her as well. Her last computer was an all-in-one; it looked nice, and wasn’t too bad, but is essentially impossible to upgrade. She still has a decent laptop (and we have Chromebooks galore at our house), so building a powerful, upgradable desktop should be a great machine for her to use at home for many years to come.

Laptop only?

The other way that people tackle computer setups is to go laptop-only; buy a very powerful laptop, and haul it around anywhere you go. I’ve considered that a few times, but I’m quite pleased with my current setup. Everything syncs automatically (primarily using Google Drive, Dropbox and Gmail), so I can sit at any machine and get things done. With my new Chromebook to use on the go (along with my older Windows laptop for some situations), it all comes together rather nicely.

What does your current computer setup look like?

Playing with the Acer Chromebook R13

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I’ve been a big fan of Google Chromebooks since they first came out. I first started playing with them more than six years ago and they’ve only gotten better since then. Chromebooks even recently started outselling Mac laptops, though that’s largely due to their much lower cost.

I’ve had a handful of Chromebooks over the years (and even a Chromebox on our office TV) and just received a new one for Christmas — the Acer Chromebook R13.

There were a few things that drew me to the R13.

Memory

We have three Chromebooks in our house, and each of them only has 2GB of RAM. Because it’s such a light operating system, that is more than adequate for most situations, but I tend to have a lot of tabs open and a bit more memory would be nice. The R13 has 4GB (along with a faster processor) and it makes a nice difference.

Google Play Store

Google is slowly rolling out access to the Google Play Store (used on Android devices) to various Chromebook models. This is a game-changer, as it allows you to load millions of other apps onto your Chromebook, and the R13 is one of the first Chromebooks to have this feature.

It’s imperfect for now (some apps don’t work properly), but it’ll be increasingly useful as it becomes more polished.

Convertible touch screen

To go along with the Play Store access, the R13 has a touch screen and a hinge that flips all the way around to make it work like a tablet.

It’s a bit of a fingerprint magnet, but is responsive and works well. Once you get the screen past 180 degrees, the system flips into “tablet mode” — apps become full screen and an onscreen keyboard pops up when you need it.

Battery life

Given their lightweight operating system, all Chromebooks tend to have excellent battery life. While I’ve not tested this one too much yet, it’s expected to last for up to 12 hours per charge and my early usage is roughly in line with that.

At the end of the day, the Chromebook is still not capable enough to be my full-time computer, but it’s getting closer all the time. I still have my desktop and home and at work, but this will likely become my primary laptop. I’m very impressed with the way Chrome OS has improved over the years, and I’m excited to see where they take it in the future.

Do you have a Chromebook yet? What do you think of it?

Adding a Google Home to the mix

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One toy on my Christmas list this year was to pick up a “Google Home”, Google’s competitor to Amazon’s Echo. If you’re not familiar with Google Home, here is a promo video that Google produced a few months ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KpLHdAURGo

At the end of the day, Google Home is very similar to the Echo. The big differences you’ll find are that Echo is better for home automation (if you have smart lightbulbs, etc) and buying products from Amazon, while Google Home is much better at understanding your life (calendar, traffic, etc) and complex questions.

The guys at This Week in Tech did a nice head-to-head comparison of the two of them:

As the guys in that video concluded in the end, if you’re deep in Google’s ecosystem (like I am), then Google Home is the way to go. If you’re not too deep in Google and love the idea of home automation and voice shopping with Amazon, then Echo is likely your better bet.

Speed

While I already have a few devices near me that can deal with “ok google” commands (phone and watch), Google Home is very fast. The microphones on it are incredibly responsive, so tossing a command across the room (“ok google what’s the weather like?

“) results in an almost instant response.

Battery

One thing I’ve heard from other reviews, and I’m beginning to experience myself, is that people often buy multiple Google Home devices so they can have them in more than one room. Part of the reason for that is because Google Home doesn’t have a battery; it has to stay plugged in. If you want to move it from one room to another, you’ll need to deal with unplugging/replugging, letting it boot back up, etc.

I’m also thinking a battery would be handy for using it in the backyard as a killer bluetooth speaker. Perhaps version two will have that.

Do you have one of these devices yet? If not, which of these is the one you’d prefer?

Android’s new “live wallpapers” are quite smart

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Google first introduced the concept of “live wallpaper” on Android on version 2.1 back in 2009. It was a cute idea, but didn’t work especially well. Back then, the “live” part of the wallpapers often required that you touch them. There are already plenty of other touch points on a phone, so adding that in was not especially useful.

With the release of the new Pixel phone, Google has re-imagined the concept of live wallpapers and it’s quite impressive. For example, here is my current wallpaper:

It looks like a neat shot of the earth, and it is, but it’s so much more interesting than that.

Location:

First, it’s centered on my current location on the globe.

Movement: When you log in or swipe between screens, it has a very subtle zooming effect.

Real-time sun and lighting:

I took this image at 8:48am EST. You can see the east coast of the US is light, while the central and west part of the country are still dark with (fake) city lights glowing.

Real-time clouds: All of the clouds are updated in real-time from satellite imagery.

At the end of the day this is just wallpaper, and not really a big deal. However, it shows that Google is working hard to make every piece of this phone a premium experience. They worked with the design agency B-Reel to come up with these, and this post on the B-Reel site digs deeper into some of the unique wallpaper features that they came up with.

I tend not to care too much about Android wallpaper, but I’ll admit that these have been fun to play with and add just a little extra fun-factor to the phone.

Google Keep is the best solution for quick notes

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It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Asana for task management. For keeping up with projects, assignees, timelines and notes, Asana is tough to beat. That said, all of us at GreenMellen keep a small to-do list on the side for quick thoughts and notes. I’ve bounced around to a few different solutions over the years, but always come back to Google Keep.

When Google Keep was first released, it was only available on the web and Android. A few years ago they added iPhone support and their Chrome extension continues to improve, so it’s an easy way to keep up with quick notes wherever you are. They even have Android Wear support; it seems kind of cheesy, but it’s very handy to have your shopping list on your wrist and not have to fumble around with your phone.

While I love Google Keep, I certainly try out other solutions as they come along such as…

Simplenote

One that really intrigues me is Simplenote. As the name suggests, it’s simple. Very simple. It’s owned by Automattic, the folks behind WordPress, so that was of interest to me. It’s a very fast app and has solutions for most platforms.

There are some drawbacks, though:

  • Too simple. Being simple, there are no colors, no automatic links, no image embedding, no checklists, etc. I appreciate the philosophy behind that, but often wished for “just this one feature…”.
  • Hidden notes. It collapses your notes and makes you click each one to view it, similar to email. This is indeed “simple”, but I like that Keep just shows me the contents of my notes without having to open each one.
  • Bugs. It had some bugs where sometimes notes wouldn’t save, extra characters would get inserted, things like that.

I’ll certainly keep an eye on it, and may switch it to someday, but not yet.

Google Drive

Google Drive isn’t ideal for quick notes, but I thought I’d mention it here because it’s a big part of our note taking usage. Google Keep is awesome for quick notes, but Google Drive is where things live long-term. Some reasons why it is great for long-term note keeping:

  • One home. It’s where we store all of our client information (logos, photos, etc), so it makes sense that our other notes would be in there with them. This is a big reason we’ve moved away from Dropbox. Dropbox is great for files, but with Drive we can put our files and our online “docs” in the same folder. Keeping everything in one place is essential.
  • Collaboration. It has shared real-time sync. Even though it’s years old, this feature still amazes me — you can watch letter-by-letter as your colleagues type into a document! When we’re in meetings, we always share a Google Doc so that we are taking a single, comprehensive set of notes, rather than separate notes that need to be combined later.

Evernote

The big competitor that everyone talks about is Evernote. I’ve been a huge fan of theirs for the better part of the last decade, but I’ve pretty much removed all of my notes from them and moved on. Why?

  • It’s slow to sync. They’ve worked on speeding it up, but the infrastructure behind it requires it to literally sync every x minutes rather than just keep up in real time like Keep, Simplenote, Google Drive, etc.
  • I simply have no place for it. Because it’s not fast enough to sync real-time, I need to use a solution like Google Keep for those notes. However, it’s also not as robust as Google Drive. As a result, it’s kind of in no-man’s land where nothing feels like it belongs there anymore.
  • There is essentially no free version. I was a premium user of Evernote for a long time, but had eased back into the free tier. Now they’ve stripped the free version to the point where it is no longer useful for me. My choices are to pay for a product that I don’t really use much, or stop using it. I’ve stopped using it.

I keep a very open mind about apps like this, but for now Google Keep is the clear winner. It does a great job, is available on all major platforms, and is free to use.

What do you use for quick notes?

Uptime monitors with a delay are very useful

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A few years ago, I set out to find a good service to monitor uptime on all of the websites we manage (it varies, up to around 150 of them at any given time). It initially came down to two leading contenders:

  1. Pingdom – Undoubtedly the best, but it would have cost us around $249/mo.
  2. Uptime Robot – Not as slick, but at the time it was completely free!

The problem I quickly had with Uptime Robot is that it would tell me about every little blip that a site had. We let our clients host wherever they want, and while we do our best to steer them to quality hosts, we ultimately leave the decision up to them. As such, some of them are on less-than-stellar hosts that tend to have quite a few “blips”. I’d get a text that a site was down, but by the time I went to take a look at it the site was already back up. This caused me to become blind to the onslaught of those notifications, and I was more likely to miss it if there was a major problem.

With more digging I eventually found Port Monitor. The great feature that they have is multiple checks — it can look at a site every x minutes, then only alert me if it’s been down a few times in a row. If a site has a blip it’ll leave me alone, but if it’s down a few times in a row I’ll get a text. Perfect. For us it was $69.95/mo (they start as low as $5.45/mo for 10 sites), but that was well worth the cost.

ManageWP

Fast forward a year and we’re using ManageWP to help keep sites updated, and they added an uptime monitor — great!

uptime-monitor

The problem was that it is powered by Uptime Robot, and we’d have the same issue, so I kept running Port Monitor alongside of it.

Little did I know, but a few months later Uptime Robot added the feature I love (as a paid add-on) and ManageWP incorporated it as well. I just discovered it last week and I’m elated! It won’t change much for us, but being able to save the $69.95/mo from Port Monitor is a good thing. If I were to use Uptime Robot with their paid plan, it would just cost $11.60/mo. However, as part of ManageWP it’s essentially free (as part of the plan we already pay for).

They handle the feature a bit differently, but it works out the same. In the case of Uptime Robot and ManageWP, they let you add a “delay” to the notifications. When they detect a site is down, they’ll start counting down a delay of a few minutes. If the site comes back in the meantime, they simply move on. If the site is still down after the delay, then you get notified. It looks like this in ManageWP:

2016-12-06_20-25-29

If you manage a handful of WordPress websites or more, I encourage you to check out ManageWP to help make your life easier. If you manage non-WordPress sites, then Uptime Robot could be a great tool to add to your arsenal.

Burst mode on Android finally works like iOS

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I mentioned a few days ago that I was jealous of one iPhone feature; iMessage. I think Apple is really mishandling it by not making it available on other devices, but if you’re an iPhone user it’s a great piece of software.

Over the years, Android has typically been the first to develop new features on phones and Apple would come along later and implement them on iPhone. However, one great feature that iPhone unveiled first has finally made it over to Android. It’s a little thing, but makes a big difference; grouped burst mode photos from your camera.

The way it used to work on Android (and Google Photos) is that if you took a quick burst of photos, each photo would show up separately in your gallery, like this:

It was accurate (I indeed shot all of those photos), but made things quite messy. However, when I shot some burst photos a few days ago, I noticed that Android put them behind a single thumbnail with an icon in the corner to show you how many photos were behind it, like these:

If you click on a photo, you can slide through all of the them and pick your favorite. Better still, Google will often use them to create some amazing “auto awesome” animations, like the one below. Note that this isn’t a video; it’s a series of burst-mode captured photos that Google automatically stitched together into an animated gif:

Whether you’re on iPhone or Android, Google Photos is an amazing product to use. It’s free for anyone willing to “limit” their photos to 15 megapixels (more than enough for everyone aside from the most serious photographers) and you can literally load tens of thousands of photos in there.

When you have the app on your phone, new photos are automatically uploaded and processed so they’re ready to go. In the case of the sledding photo above, I shot those while we were at the event, and before I got home they were all automatically uploaded to the cloud and some animations were created.

Finally, a fairly recent feature to Google Photos can help some of you that need more space on your phone. The feature is simply named “free up space”. Because Google syncs all of your photos to the cloud, you don’t need to keep a copy of the full photo on your phone. At any time, you can tap the “free up space” option and recover a ton of extra space on your phone, without losing any photos or having to waste time figuring out how to back them up.

The iPhone vs. Android debate has been fun to watch, and will continue to be that way for some time to come. I really enjoy the way those two companies compete, because consumers are the winner of those fights by seeing better and better phones come out each year, with awesome new features and apps like the ones shown above.

What is your preferred system for handling all of your photos?