Practical Technology

The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early [...]

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Mea culpa. When the news first broke that Adobe was no longer going to be selling its Adobe Creative software line– Photoshop, InDesign, DreamWeaver, etc., etc. — as Adobe Creative CloudI thought Adobe had moved their creative professional product line to the cloud. I was wrong. My only consolation is that everyone else also seems [...]

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Intuit, makers of Quicken and QuickBooks, is making its popular online personal finance service Mint available to financial institutions. As Ron Shevlin, senior analyst at Aite Group, told American Banker, “I’m surprised it took so long“. Indeed, you could see this move coming at least three years ago when Aaron Patzer, Mint’s founder and then Intuit [...]

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What makes a “perfect” smartphone? Some of my fellow journalist buddies and I wrestled with the question, and here’s what we came up with: First, some part of “perfection” depends on the person. For example, I love QWERTY keyboards, so my personal favorite phone is a Motorola Droid 4. Most people could care less about [...]

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2013 may become known as the year of hacker. Following sucessful hacks of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and NBC‘s Web sites and servers,  the popular multi-platform, note-taking Web application Evernote servers have been hacked. Evernote hacked, forces password reset. More >

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