Another nice feature of the Reader application is the ability to 'browse' the paper by zooming out and seeing previews of the surrounding pages, which nicely recreates the feeling of browsing the 'real' paper.

Oddly, though, during our tests, the scroll wheel on our mouse didn't work in the application, and we had to resort to using the keyboard to flip pages.

For Free: Crossword, Front Page, Business, Magazine, and Most Emailed

If you don't subscribe to the Times or Times Reader, you can still access articles from the New York Times front page, the business section, and the most emailed articles from the Times. If you love the New York Times crossword puzzle, you will be happy to hear that an interactive version of the day's puzzle is also available for free.

For the Sunday Edition, content from the Magazine is available for free, though the Sunday Business section is hidden behind the paywall.

It is important to note that the Times already gives readers offline access to its content through its iPhone application, and a lot of the functionality of the Reader application is also duplicated in the Article Skimmer - though without offline access, of course.

The Times Reader excels in the presentation of the content, and while apps like this will surely not be enough to save the newspaper industry, we are glad to see that the Times continues to innovate and try new business models and ways to reach and retain readers.

Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

Twitter Client

For most users, the most important part of EventBox is probably its Twitter client, and the good news is that this is also one of its strongest aspects though it does have its flaws. For example, you can easily create persistent searches and even though it is a bit cumbersome, you can also create groups within Eventbox's Twitter client. To do so, you have to set up a folder by right-clicking on the Twitter icon, and then you can drag and drop different users or searches into this folder.

Sadly, however, EventBox doesn't seem to feature any support for URL-shorteners, which might be a deal-breaker for a lot of users. Correction: EventBox does support URL-shorteners - the feature is just a bit hidden in the General settings. EventBox also only gives you limited control over how often it pings Twitter's API.

Other Services

The Facebook client works like you would expect it to, with support for photo uploads and status updates, and the Google Reader integration also works well, as long as you don't subscribe to too many feeds. Our standard Google Reader account, with far more than 1,000 feeds, crashed the application.

In many ways, EventBox is very similar to Skimmer, which we reviewed a few weeks ago, and which, since then, has been updated with a version that addressed a lot of our issues with the original release, but the two programs feature support for different services.

Get it Free from MacHeist

Overall, Eventbox is a pretty interesting social media desktop client. It would be great if it supported a few more features, such as easier group creation for Twitter, or the ability to sort stories in Reddit (and maybe support for Digg), but it is definitely worth checking out if you are a Mac user.

Normally, the application costs $15 after a free 14-day trial, but you can currently download a free version of EventBox from MacHeist. It is important to note, though, that while the MacHeist version is available for free without any limitations, any updates to the app that you initiate will start the 14-day shareware countdown.

While you are there, also have a look at the MacHeist bundle that is currently available on MacHeist for $39. It features a number of interesting Mac applications, and 25% of every sale goes to charity. Also, after MacHeist reaches $400,000 in sales, a number of new applications will become available as part of the bundle.

Let's get back to Skimmer, now with our eyes open to the design side. We can mention that it's not extremely fast, that it lacks the ability to re-tweet, that the icons are small and somewhat mysterious, and that (in some modes) it takes up a large amount of screen real-estate. But those qualms are almost beside the point when you consider that it is presenting information from multiple sources in a way that has never been realized before. In fact, I am guessing the designers were going for the word unprecedented. The tile-based layout, the unique font that is both modern and legible, the smooth updates from one mode to another all belie a careful attention to detail that is all too often lacking on other tools in their haste to support everything under the sun.

We mentioned that Fallon is releasing Skimmer along with a broader image push, and you can see this on their site.  Each page carries over the same tile-based concept, cross-fading slideshow effects and generous space given to text areas. You might think all this design work is a waste of time, but think about the last time you saw the 'future crime' interface in Minority Report. You were impressed, right? I can guarantee you, that interface was not conceived as data-driven. It's pure, unadulterated design work.

"A new set of advanced wireless technologies now promises to bring affordable, high-speed Internet connectivity to the masses. This set of technologies, and the market opportunity they create, has been termed the "Portable Internet", and is the subject of a new ITU report."

From the free summaries posted on the ITU website, I extracted these highlights:

- Portable Internet in this report means "a platform for high-speed data access using Internet Protocol (IP)"... it includes "advanced wireless technologies" such as Wi-Fi.

- Since 2000, Internet penetration has grown at a slower rate than mobile (blamed on the dot.com crash).

- Internet users often "face a trade-off between higher connection speeds and mobility" --> fixed-line technologies generally = higher speeds but low mobility; 3G mobile networks = greater mobility but at lower speeds.

- Here's a table (from ITU) of Portable Internet technologies:

A lot of those acronyms aren't mainstream yet, but within 5-10 years they may well be!

The Rise of Asia/Pacific

The Asia/Pacific region seems to be a particular area of growth for mobile technologies. I've just started reading a book called The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook, which I hope will provide some insights into this trend towards the mobile internet. The ITU press release has this to say about it:

"The Asia-Pacific region passed the symbolic mark of one billion telecommunication users, mobile phones and fixed lines combined in October 2003. Until now, those users that wanted to have high-speed access to the Internet had to have a fixed-line connection. Before the end of this decade, another billion users of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are likely to be added to the region's networks, but the majority of them will be connected using radiocommunications."

In a separate press release, ITU reported that Asia-Pacific has overtaken North America in both Mobile subscriber numbers and Internet users. Largely due to China, where the huge population makes them a key country for the mobile internet.

Maybe I'm in the right part of the world after all ;-)

All of this augers well for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, which I'm willing to wager will be the 'Portable Internet Games' - or whatever the catchphrase for mobile internet will be by then!

Connecting the pieces

With all these devices and accompanying types of data I can now record - text, audio, video, photos, etc - it is apparent that I have a need to connect all the different pieces together. Not only that, I want to place myself at the center of my digital media.

Joining all the pieces together, using myself as the locus, is how I strive to retain a sense of control over my technological environment. So naturally I want the process to be as easy as possible, so that my sense (illusion?) of control is greater.

I want to be able to connect my mobile phone to my PC, for example. And connect to the Internet on my PDA, via a bluetooth connection on my mobile phone. And I want to synch PDA data with my PC. There are lots of other scenarios, particularly as there are an increasing number of software applications and services I can add to the mix. For example, I recently signed up to Flickr. So now I can take a photo on my phone, email it from there to the Flickr server, then copy it across to my Movable Type photoblog. To view it I can hook up my PDA or phone to the Internet, via my bluetooth phone connection, and view the result in a WAP browser. Or simply log on to my Tablet (if I had one).

Total Connectivity

We're approaching the long-held dream of total connectivity. Whether wired or wireless, we're at the stage now where we can connect a variety of devices together via a variety of software apps or services. The issue we're having in 2004 is that total connectivity is far from a polished reality. It still takes a fair bit of configuration effort to hook up your mobile phone to wirelessly connect to the Internet, for example. It takes some technical nous to automatically send your phone pics to your blog via Flickr, to use the example I quoted earlier. Things aren't as user friendly as we'd like them to be in this new Mobile Internet world. Which is to be expected - it takes time for new technologies to piece themselves together.

Even self-confessed geeks have trouble connecting all the bits together. I know I do - for example getting my Palm PDA to speak to my new mobile phone via bluetooth took a bit of to'ing and fro'ing (and googling). Another person who has been writing about connecting technology together is Lilia from Mathemegenic - in her case it is WiFi, Tablet PC SP2, SkypeOut and Bluetooth headsets. I think that even outgeeks me ;-)

So how do we make things user-friendly?

That's the six million dollar question. I think this is where the Digital Lifestyle Aggregation concept and similar ideas come in. The DLA is Marc Canter's baby and at heart it's all about making it simple for people to easily connect all their digital appliances and services together. In Marc and his company Broadband Mechanics's case, the DLA will be like a wrapper for all the open source digital services in the world - Flickr, blogs, Open Media and others. Well, there's more to it than that - but I'm trying to simplify it here :-)

Other companies, notably the "big co's" are taking a more proprietary approach. For example Apple's iLife suite of multimedia tools - made up of GarageBand, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and iTunes. According to Apple, they are "tightly-integrated applications that work together seamlessly". In other words, Apple is pushing the 'user-friendly connectivity' angle too. Further proof is that the word "easy" (or a derivative of it) is mentioned 10 times on the iLife homepage!

A key part of Apple's general strategy is to position themselves as a hip and trendy "digital lifestyle" company. The uber-cool and mega-successful iPod is the cornerstone (currently) of that strategy.

Microsoft shoehorns into DLA's

As for Microsoft, well their strategy has always been to bundle as many products and services as possible on top of their dominant OS. Exhibit 1: Windows and the attempt to integrate the Internet Explorer browser. Exhibit 2: Longhorn, which is being designed to be a kind of 'Desktop Web'. Which is to say: browsing, search and a lot of other Web things are going to be integrated into the Longhorn OS.

Until recently, Microsoft hasn't really challenged Apple on the Digital Media front. But their new MSN Music Service is a sign of a change in strategy and is a direct challenge to Apple. In a recent interview Bill Gates elucidates on where Microsoft is heading with digital media.

For example, Gates said (specifically about digital media in the living room): "We see these things as connected. But this isn't the point yet where consumers see those things totally connected. Over time, a lot of the advances will come through the simplicity of how those work together."

Emphasis in that last sentence mine. I think Bill Gates hit the nail on the head there - but then hitting things on the head is what Microsoft is good at. In 2004, there are too many media products and services to connect together and so mainstream users don't know where to begin. Not only that, connecting those things together can get complicated pretty quickly (Bluetooth is a prime example).

The key - for Broadband Mechanics, Apple, Microsoft and whoever else wants to jump in the ring - is to make connecting digital things together as simple as possible for the end-user.

Final Thought

Currently users are forced to fit technology products and services together like a jigsaw - except the pieces have jagged edges and often don't match. For this reason it's usually only geeks who attempt to fit together the jigsaw. That's the situation in 2004, but it's slowly getting better. DLA's hold the promise of making the jigsaw user-friendly for everybody and smoothing out those edges.