Want to pin pictures of deer costumes you find on the iPad in Pintrest? It’s possible to add a bookmark within Safari that lets you do this. As of February 7th, here are the steps:

First: Press and hold on, then Copy this:

javascript:void((function(){var e=document.createElement('script');e.setAttribute('type','text/javascript');e.setAttribute('charset','UTF-8');e.setAttribute('src','http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinmarklet.js?r='+Math.random()*99999999);document.body.appendChild(e)})());

This is the script hiding under the Pin It button at  http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/.

Second, and Second To Last: In Safari on the iPad, open up any site you like, hit the share button () and tap Add Bookmark. Give the bookmark a new name, like “Pin It”,  then Save.

Last: Tap the bookmarks button, find the “Pin It” bookmark you just created (resist the URGE to tap the bookmark!), tap Edit, and NOW tap the bookmark. Tap into the address, hit the x to clear it, then tap into the address field again and Paste. Tap Done on the keyboard and Done in Bookmarks.

Now any time you want to pin something to Pintrest, get the page open in Safari (in most iOS apps this involves dancing along buttons) and use your “Pin It” bookmark.

By the way: I found if when the iPhone Pintrest app installed, using the bookmark launched the Pintrest app to its “Add A Pin” screen, but this doesn’t seem to work. I uninstalled the Pintrest app, since it’s not so useful. If you don’t want to uninstall, just switch back to Safari and you’ll find the web version of the “Add A Pin” screen waiting for you.

While getting rolling again with Google Chrome I remembered this cool option in the Windows version: “Wrench->Tools->Create application shortcuts”.

Create application shortcuts on Windows 7 has a “pin to taskbar” option that pins the website you’re looking at into an “app window.” I love this because it makes switching apps consistent whether they’re Windows apps or web apps, and I avoid accidentally closing heaping piles of web apps, as each has its own place and icon.

Here’s the page above as a Chrome app window:

‘

I’ve been using pin to taskbar in Internet Explorer 9 for some time, but I like Chrome’s approach better because Chrome forces a behavior that IE9 leaves problematically optional. Here’s some of the differences and similarities:

Chrome app windows don’t have tabs or an address/search box. Internet Explorer 9 app windows have it all. Sounds like IE9’s better, right? Not necessarily. In IE I punch in new searches/tabs into whichever IE-like window I happen to see first, and later lose track of which window has which tabs, and there isn’t really help for that: you have to check every window, and that means you have to remember which windows qualify. Chrome’s model forces you to stick with the Chrome main window for these kinds of things. Tabs pile up there, and no where else, whether you like it or not. I like it.

Both Chrome and IE9 remember and restore the size/position of each app window. This isn’t a big deal to me, and is even a bit obnoxious, but I know this was a “oh, you’ve gotta try Chrome” feature back when it first came out.

IE9 has per-app jump lists and notification badges which some apps take advantage of. I tend to use jump lists only for recent files, which web apps don’t tend to support, so this isn’t that useful to me.

IE9’s option is more discoverable; Chrome’s option is muddled up with ‘pinned tabs’.  IE9’s drag-tab-to-taskbar is “obvious.” Dragging-tab-to-taskbar in Chrome did the very wrong thing. After not discovering it this way, I spent quite some time thinking perhaps Chrome ‘pinned tabs’ was its cool new horribly broken replacement…  but that’s a post for another time. No, it’s under “Wrench->Tools->Create application shortcuts”.

I’ve lived in south Idaho for 10 years, and north Idaho the prior 20 years, and while most colloquialisms seem to be the same across the state, one that’s common in south Idaho (Boise), and I never heard in north Idaho, is “needs fixed”.

The pattern extends to “needs <any other verb ending in -ed>” and the even more unusual past-tense pairing “needed <verb ending in -ed>”, as in “my iPad needed updated.”

DailyWritingTips.com suggests ”needs fixed” originates in Pittsburgh and spreads through “a narrow band in the middle of the country extending from the east cost to Montana”, but the pattern certainly is creeping even further west to Boise.

This morning a typically well-spoken NPR KBSU news person said something “needed fixed”, so I thought this “needed blogged”.

Update: Boise A&E personality Michael Deeds provides another example: “Warped needed tweaked“.

We’ve had an Acer Iconia Tab W500 (Amazon, $500) in the house for a few months now, so I figured it was time to give it a review.

Our family had netbook at one point (a 3rd generation HP with Windows 7) but we returned it within weeks. While the modern netbook is a fine computer, a small keyboard isn’t productive for typing, and for media and reading experiences, a trackpad is a buzz kill. It’s a fiendish device of torture on every Mac or Windows laptop I’ve ever had, and when placed directly in your crotch, as  with a netbook, it’s in its most inconvenient and obnoxious form.

Now the Iconia Tab W500 is still no typing-productivity device. The included keyboard attachment is hazardous to you & your slate’s health, and you should never use it. It’s the worst keyboard I’ve ever used, never mind it doesn’t hold the tablet part securely enough to be used anywhere but on a table, and not really even there.

But the W500 is unexpectedly awesome for email, media, and web browsing/web apps, in no small part to the touchscreen’s inevitable defeat of the trackpad on netbooks. I was surprised that touch works nearly as well as on the excellent iPad. I find something’s not touchable or tricky to interact with about as often as I do on iPad, and that’s saying something. The screen is smooth glass and very accurate, even moreso than the high-end business convertable tablet I use at work, and Windows 7 is set at 125% zoom so with the exception of some apps (Zune…) everything’s big enough to touch.

Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome are smooth on most sites, though they both get bogged down on ad-heavy sites. HD video from YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu plays full-screen quite nicely.

With a couple adjustments (see below) the on-screen keyboard does the right thing and you can peck out tweets, googs, and runs of text. If I could ask my employer for one Christmas present in Windows 8, it’d be input prediction/spelling and that sweet chick-chack-chick sound from Windows Phone 7. (The Windows 7 on-screen keyboard is dead silent, and that’s just creepy.)

I continue to be surprised by the device’s performance and quality. I bought this sight unseen thinking it’d return it and slink into line at the Apple store, but no, the Iconia Tab W500′s a keeper!

A couple things you may want to know about the W500:

• It has an exhaust fan. It’s near silent, but not silent. The back gets warm, not hot, and the air trickling from the fan is usually room-temperature.
• We’ve found it sustains good performance for 2 users switching profiles without logging out. (It has 2GB RAM, and I think it could probably sustain 4 users.) See my to-do list below regarding multiple users.
• The screen rotates when you turn it. It takes 3 seconds to rotate. There’s also a physical lock switch.
• It’s rated at 6 hours battery life. It can happen, but expect 4 unless you’re only web-browsing or reading.
• What you’ll find at the sides, in wide/landscape orientation:
  • Bottom: 2 USB ports and the lock switch. Speakers face the rear, and there’s a Windows button (a hardware Start button) facing the front, which glows unnecessarily
  • Left: HDMI port, SD card slot (yes you can add storage), fan, volume rocker, an strangely small sleep button, and headphone jack
  • Top: The second fan port and front and rear cameras
  • Right: Power jack

A to-do list:

• Update to Internet Explorer 9 and Flash 10.3 (Google Chrome is fine, but you’re on your own figuring out how to make touch pan/zoom work. IE9 has nice touch pan/zoom out of the box.)
• Move the keyboard to the bottom of the screen, make it wider, and change the keyboard “drawer” to display on hover instead of click (because that way you don’t have to touch the drawer twice when you want to pull the keyboard out immediately.)
• If more than one person will use the tablet
• Create a Windows account for each person
• Change the power option to require login on wake (this makes it easier to switch users.)
• Don’t uninstall “Acer Device Control.” This is responsible for screen rotation. All the rest of the “Acer”-titled apps, on our device, anyhow, was OK to uninstall.
• Try uninstalling Windows feature “Windows Search”. I find we’re not creating new files, and use the same apps over and over, so we aren’t searching. Uninstalling Windows Search gives back some Start space and some speed.

Some penalty-offsetting deals got Coral & I to hop to AT&T to get new Windows Phones. We both got the Samsung Focus.

We LOVE THIS PHONE. (Full disclosure, I do work here.)

Coral, moving on from KIN Two, misses the “stalker-mode” home screen of the KIN, but says she likes not being a stalker, and the Windows Phone People hub is a good balance between KIN and the browser.

Windows Phone 7 is leaps and bounds better than my Samsung Omnia II and its Windows Phone 6.5 operating system. I won’t be going back there, even to talk about how much better this phone is than that one. But if I put a number on it, it’s 5351 times better.

Here’s the good, the good apps, the bad, and the bad apps:

The good!

• Search in all its forms… from voice search to call or find stuff, to the beautiful full-screen Bing. Tip: You can press the hardware search button in Marketplace, but you’ll have to be specific with your search terms as it searches through music as well… and the amount of music available through Zune overwhelms the apps. There 100s of albums with the word “Amazon” in the name, for example.
• The fluidity of the software and animations is amazing and inspiring.
• The quality and speed of the camera, with the handy ability to take pictures even with the phone locked. This is a point & shoot camera; you hold it like a camera and start pressing the shutter button.
• You can try many apps & games before you buy. This is a good thing for consumers, and hopefully it moves app quality vs. app quantity in the right direction. The downside is I find spend a lot of time playing with non-free apps I wouldn’t otherwise consider, which was something I enjoyed avoiding in the past due to the sticker price. But I suppose if not for this, there’d be even more apps (the neutered and the hung) and I’d have the same issue. I’ll get over it.
• The Xbox Live games are generally right up there in quality with those on the Xbox Live Arcade… and new games keep showing up, just like on the Xbox. The “indie” community is there too, in force as on the Xbox. I’m amazed how many people are cranking out games for these platforms.
• The on-screen keyboard is better than any hardware phone keyboard I’ve used, and I’ve used a couple. The keyboard even sounds great, which is an odd thing to say about a keyboard, but it does.

The good apps!

• OneNote: Coral & I have several shopping lists and idea lists shared between us and it’s productive and a lot of fun.
• Internet Explorer: It’s fast and I have yet to run into a site I wasn’t wholly satisfied with in the browser. The tingle means it’s working. I like being able to pin pages to the home screen.
• Shazam makes grabbing a song for later listening in full on Zune Pass a snap.
• gReadie is a Google Reader application and the developers seem to be very attentive. gReat job folks.
• foursquare is a location check-in game. Although I know everyone’s been having fun with this for a long time on the iPhone, Android, et al., but shh, it’s new to me, and it’s a waste of time, and I like it.

The bad!

• Email summaries don’t pop up on the lock screen. Text message summaries do, as do notifications for other types of apps, so why not email, at least as an option?
• In some text input fields the keyboard doesn’t suggest/auto-correct.
• You can’t open calendars other than the ‘default’ calendar for a given Windows Live ID in the Calendar app. This means you can’t open calendars that have been shared to you on Windows Live, or more than one calendar. If you  planned ahead or are lucky enough not to have a bunch of calendars already, there’s a setup involving extra Windows Live IDs that works.
• The camera app forget its settings at some point. The defaults are great, but I suspect people think they’re using “anti-shake” because they turned it on once, and aren’t.

The bad apps!

• Marketplace (the on-phone app you use to get apps and games) is strangely laid out and has some performance issues, the worst of which it hangs on me every couple days, and after you return to the home screen, it will no longer launch. This is a turn-the-phone-off-and-on-again caliber problem. (Tip: To turn the Samsung Focus off, you hold down the power button, and the phone says “Goodbye!”. Then press it again to turn it on. It’s a pretty fast reboot. No popping the battery required.)
• Weather apps should have more beautiful live tiles. The popular ones that have live tiles (weather.com, Weatherbug) make even sunny weather look like a daily Boise inversion, and HTC’s app, which has been upgraded to a live tile, I can’t review.
• WordPress, which came out yesterday, needs work. It both posted something that I intended to be draft, and lost my edits to that something.
• Camera-based apps are still clearly waiting for real time capture support from Windows Phone, and in the meantime seem to be affected by forgotten settings… for example, you can’t take a macro picture of a barcode easily when the flash is not in macro mode.

I think “day-and-date” is an unusual term walking amok as a warm up.

This morning I was reading a couple articles about “day-and-date” deals. Here “day-and-date” refers to no delay between availability of video (or other) content in one form and another, a hot topic in regards to Netflix, Redbox, Blockbuster, and Hulu, and certain to get hotter as more people use these or they die off.

I believe the origin is “same day and date” and it comes from the film industry, but what’s wrong with “same day?”

One thing I think Microsoft nailed in Office 2010 is making it easier to use & explain: we brought back the “File” menu that was disguised as an orb in Office 2007 (the  proper name is “Office Button”)

Yes, “File” as in “How do you print? You click File then you click Print.” If you missed this, there was no “File” in Office 2007. Well, no matter, it’s back in Office 2010.

It’s interesting that the hot-off-the-presses Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta apps, which have an Office-like feel, haven’t caught up on this change, and are stuck in a very awkward spot between Office 2007 and Office 2010:

(OneNote 2010, the coolest application you never used, has a “File” menu.)

(Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011, the other coolest application you never used, has a, um, well I guess it’s a menu.)

I suspect the Windows Live team built on foundation laid for Windows 7 apps, which came out when Office teams had made the from “orb” to “tab”, but hadn’t got as far as bringing the text “File” back.

Please Windows Live team… bust that foundation up and do it right. This button has no reasonable name. It looks like a desk phone, I suppose. At least the orb was describable as an orb!

My wife was aghast when she found out from a friend that KIN is not being sold through Verizon as of July. I think her specific quote was “WHAT ARE YOU CRAZY?”, and then her KIN’s Loop started acting up. We love it anyway.

I explained that Windows Phone 7 is getting traction with developers and has similar “loopy” people-oriented features, so KIN sales were destined for a certain brevity of life… not necessarily ended by July, but by October-November. I think we agreed it doesn’t really matter to us; her KIN should keep working within contract.

One thing I couldn’t explain is what might happen to KINs, if there were any, that weren’t sold between July and October-November when the new Windows Phones can be bought.

Whenever anyone uses the KIN to post to Facebook, there’s a link to the KIN ‘proxy’ Facebook application on the post. Applications on Facebook have a monthly-active users metric. I can’t find any details on how that Facebook metric works, but assume it’s an average of the number of people who used the application at least once in the prior 1 month.

Through June and July the number was approaching 10,000. (This was reported thoroughly around July 8.)

Now look at it. Today it’s nearing 40,000. It’s August 17, more than one month after July 8, and so totally encompasing whatever Facebook’s concept of “monthly” might be in that difference.

What could have happened?

• Facebook application monthly actives is a garbage metric, at least for this application.
• 300% more users in July-August figured out they could get their Facebook on from a phone that’s pretty much designed & marketed for that use case specifically, than in June-July
• 300% more KIN devices are in users hands July-August (so, since the phone was no longer sold by Verizon) than June-July

I don’t know which, if any of these, are the case. I think it might be some part of all 3.

The existance of an ”Android Trojan” (malicious software that does something other than what it claims to do, on Google’s phone operating system with the cute name) was tickling my language nerve this morning.

So, horse-looking humans for a human-looking robot.

The general recommendation to avoid any sort of trojan on any sort of phone (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, or otherwise)  to only install applications from the “application marketplace”, which is a store-looking virus-scanner.

If you want useful-looking information, try this link-looking bing.

Previously I told you how great my wife’s KIN Two is.

Then its web browser started causing the phone to go comatose on any web page, from the simple (Facebook mobile pages) to the unfortunately still quite simple (weather pages.) It was unresponsive to the point that the only recourse was battery removal. Even after doing that things weren’t clearing up. Clearly it was unhealthy. Maybe this is something that happens to any KIN with the current software after a few weeks, or maybe it’s a perfect storm sort of thing… but either way, the KIN was NOT being very great.

So I took a chance that normally gets men barbequed. I had Coral go to Settings > About your phone > Erase phone data. Most phones have a “forget everything” option like this, and on the KIN’s smartphone breatheren, it comes with a bunch of follow-up work to make the phone “right” again. I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea.

Not so with the KIN. She entered her Windows Live ID and after some time syncing with the KIN service the phone was exactly as it was before: all contacts, all emails, all Facebook updates, all feeds, all photos & videos taken. It came back pretty much as it was, except without the bad memories that led to the browser trouble.

Notable things that did not get synced up:

• Keep favorite websites she’d pinned as “apps”
• Keep music synced from our home PC

Sure, phones should be perfect, never act up, and all sorts of unreasonable things. But when they aren’t, don’t, or can’t, a sync service like KIN’s is a pretty nice parachute.