I was sorely disappointed with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra when it first released. I said to myself, “If they ever make G.I. Joe movie, it BETTER be good.” I wanted to slit my wrist the day I witness that movie [don't worry, I didn't]. Skimming Google Trends I saw “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” and clicked on it. To my surprise this movie trailer is pretty good. I really loved the music, the costumes look revamped, and the action scenes look pretty decent. Then again; it is a movie trailer… I’m a little liery of Bruce Willis, but whatever man. I’ll give this movie another chance — one last chance!

What Makes This Appealing?

So; what makes SCVNGR so appealing? We’re all pretty bombarded with applications for our smart phone(s) — especially with the hottest trend being the geolocation market. The biggest difference that I see between SCVNGR and the two current trend setters (Foursquare and Gowalla) is (1) the user interface and (2) how long it keeps me looking at the app. The interface is very clean and I find it much faster than Foursquare. Granted one can argue that the current speed is due to its lack of users, thus not a heavily burdened network.

As is the default – It integrates with Facebook and Twitter and makes it easy to see what you’re Facebook friends have checked into under the “Friends Feed” section. I’ve been using it for a number of weeks and I’m very happy with it. It’s using Google Places to pull the venues. That’s a plus for me, I’m still not comfortable with Facebook hosting that kind of data.

What’s Wrong with It?

I did notice, while cruising the Places screen for more friends, that I was able to view the activities of total strangers. It looks like sharing is totally open out-of-the-box. If you go into the Settings menu, you can change it to only share with your friends. Besides THAT the only thing wrong with SCVNGR is that my friends don’t know about it. It’s hard enough for me to get my immediate circle of friends into geolocation, but to have them switch to another app after finally getting them into Foursquare is going to be challenging.

Features

Once you load the application there are a couple of features accessible from the home screen: Friend’s Feed, Profile, Friends, Badges, Places, Rewards, Treks, and Social Map. There’s also a notification bar at the very bottom of the home screen.

Friend’s Feed

SCVNGR interface displaying the Friend Feed's screen.

The Friend’s Feed is pretty self explanatory, it displays a list of your friend’s check-ins. It has two tabs: Recent and Popular. To be honest I’m not sure what the criteria is for a check-in to be “popular.” The neat thing about the Recent tab is it mixes both your SCVNGR and Facebook friends. You can’t interact with the FB feed, but it’s at least nice to see where your closest buddies are.

Profile

This section really doesn’t have anything special compared to other geolocation application. It’s more or less a dashboard of how many points you have, challenges you’ve done, places you’ve visited, how many badges you’ve acquired, and how many friends you have. Your avatar is pretty big so if you really like looking at yourself, they built a function to satisfy that craving.

Friends

The Friends screen has three tabs: Find, All friends, and Leaderboard. The Friends feature is where you can expand your friend’s list by finding people in your Facebook circle that have linked their accounts to SCVNGR. You can also do a simple search for a user or invite friends by allowing the app to post a message through other social media applications you may have installed on your phone. The Leaderboard screen is where the competitive nature of a person comes out to play. Once you have a couple of friends to play with you can then compare how many points/challenges you’ve acquired. It doesn’t reset every week like Foursquare, it’s simply an overall score. So; you can be at a slight disadvantage if you friend someone that has been heavily using SCVNGR.

Badges

If you’re familiar with social media apps, badges is an aspect that these companies/apps use to exploit our loyal and competitive nature. These badges are acquired after reaching a certain status or completing a number of challenges. These badges are drawn nice so they are easy-on-the-eyes. This screen will list all the badges you’ve acquired in a four-column fashion. You can click on individual badges to get a little more detail as to what the badge is about and when you received it. My only issue with this feature is the irony that the app supports a good amount of text in order to explain what the badge is about, but the actual explanation of the badge is vague and confusing. There are many badges that I’m still unclear WHY I’ve acquired them.

Places

This is the meat and potatoes of the application. This screen will initially load all venues within your intimidate area. If a venue doesn’t show up you can do a search to add it.

Make sure you use propercase before submitting a search. If the system doesn’t find that venue it will use your submission as the entry name.

When you choose a venue to check-in to that screen has three tabs: Challenges, Activity, and Info. The default challenges with every venue is: check-in, social check-in, say something, and snap a picture. Each challenge has a certain amount of points associated with it. The social check-in is a pretty cool challenge. You and another SCVNGR user can bump phones to get twice as many points for that check-in. The more challenges you do, the more points you acquire. Once you’ve gained a certain amount of points you can then add your own challenges. I’m not sure why, but I have yet to create a challenge for the available venues. My creativity on creating challenges has proven to be limited. :-/

Rewards

The Rewards screen has two tabs: My Rewards and Nearby. This feature incorporates the growing Groupon-inspired trend of offering discounts from vendors. I haven’t tried this feature, so I can only theorize how it actually works.

Treks

This feature I believe was inspired from Gowalla’s Trips. For example the “Best of Atlanta” trek lists 8 challenges for you to complete. Once you visit one of the venues in the list, such as Georgia Aquarium, the trek challenge is to click on “Fish Face”. This particular challenge is to impersonate a fish and take a picture of your ugly mug doing it. Stuff like that is pretty cool and will certainly keep you motivated to explore.

Social Map

I was very excited when I saw this feature. It reminded me of a third-party web site a friend took me to in order to see a visual history of his Foursquare check-ins. The Social Map screen displays a map, most likely powered by Google Maps with pins of avatars showing recent activities, maximum of up to 24 hours. I can see that it shows both mine and friends’ activities. It’s got a bug or two once you start sliding that time line around and zooming in and out of the map, but it’s got a lot of potential.

Other Reviews

Initially I didn’t plan to write a detailed review of this app. I had a real hard time finding a significant Android post so I filled the gap. Below are other blog posts I found that might give you another aspect of this very intriguing app. You can find my SCVNGR profile at the following link — www.scvngr.com/fergatron — let’s stalk each other, it’ll be fun.

• SCVNGR Review – Could This Be the Foursquare of Real Estate [Tech Savvy Agent] – Video, focuses on iPhone
• SCVNGR: A check-in app with a fun twist [Android and Me]
• SCVNGR Launches Sophisticated Rewards Program [Mashable]

I’m somewhat taken back by the lack of understanding towards Google’s Chrome Web Store from various hosts on technology podcasts that I listen to, such as: Buzz Out Loud and Tech News Today. The general consensus is, “Why do we need yet another marketplace?” And “How many times will a developer have to create an application?” It’s almost as if they can’t see the future coming. In my tiny/little world I’m not afraid of marketplaces because they remind me of the software repositories available to us in Linux. Also with the semantic web meaning something to web developers, we’re finally clearing the jungle of web applications not working on multiple browsers.

Where is Google Taking Us?

Before I continue I’m going to make some assumptions, and of course we know that assuming things will make you look like an ASSumption. We should all be aware that Google more or less acts as a catalyst to what’s coming in the world of technology. The company is stacked to the brim with very smart engineers and forward thinkers; the “pathfinding” is an inevitable result. We all know that Google is horrible (simply horrible) at marketing. So; whenever they launch a product or service it may not make sense to us now, but when it all comes together you’ll be glad that Google did it and not some other mega corporation; looking at their bottom line.

Segmentation

The big debate for the podcasters is them trying to understand why Google has both the Android OS and Chrome OS. To me, it’s pretty simple. Android isn’t ready to be on devices such as a Tablet, Notebook, Netbook, or a Desktop. Instead of forking Chrome OS to work on small devices such as a smart phone, Google focused on a “small device OS” and happily named it “Android.” As for the other devices, with the operating system becoming a thing of the 90′s, Google is focusing on a platform that can interface with the increasing number of applications hosted on the Internet.

So; What About the Web Store

This web store is kind of greasing the pipes for us that already live on the Web. For those of us that have an understanding that Chrome OS is still alive and the Internet will continue to expand our abilities to be productive… the web store is giving us a glimpse into life using Chrome OS.

For one; it only works if you have a Chrome browser. While using the browser on your desktop, try using ONLY web applications. Figure out what applications you currently use and then pick the equivalent app in the Chrome Web Store. Below is a comparison table for desktop applications and their web-based counterparts.

Chrome Notebook

I signed up to the pilot program for a Cr-48 Chrome notebook. Normally; I didn’t think it was possible for a lone web developer, such as myself to get one of these, but while listening to these short-sighted podcasters — I’m optimistic. I’m a perfect candidate, I practically live on the web anyway. My biggest challenge would be web development. My most intense developing situation would be a PHP application connecting to a MySQL database, but for the most part I develop simple, yet web standards compliant web sites [INSERT SHAMELESS PLUG FOR DIGITAL ALIAS HERE]. If Google provides me an enhanced version of Notepad+ or Bluefish, I think I’d live.

I’d love to know what you think of the Chrome Web Store and where our Internet gods are taking us!

Virtual Storage-bin

For years, I’ve been using Gmail as a storage depot for mailing lists, emails from my other domains, etc.  I’m starting the slow process of removing the things I really don’t need.  The mailing lists are the easiest. As of June 1, 2010 I’m using about 2840 MB (38%) of 7461 MB storage Google set me up with.  Let’s see how long it takes me to get that number down.

Well; I Googl’d it and found this wiki. I thought I’d attempt to give it some traction since others must have the same question.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome

How to Enable Flash Support

Once I got Google Chrome installed, of course, the Flash plugin wasn’t associated with the web browser. So; here’s a quick tutorial. First off, the Chrome install is now in the “/opt” directory.  If it’s not there create a “plugins” directory:

$ sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

Now you’ll need to make a symbolic link to the “libflashplayer.so” file. This can be accomplished with the following command.

$ cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so

The system will create an alias file named “libflashplayer.so” within that plugins directory. If you’re running an x86_64 system then you’ll need to make a symbolic link to the “nswrapper” file instead of the direct “libflashplayer.so” file. Do a search and find the location that fits your system.

$ locate libflashplayer

Here’s a link to an Ubuntu-related post on Flash support for Google Chrome. http://maketecheasier.com/enable-flash-support-in-google-chrome-in-ubuntu/2009/08/19

Last night I went to my third LUG meeting at Emory University School of Law facility.  For those that don’t follow my social foot prints, I’m a part of a very well established Linux User Group called Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts. These guys have been in the game for a long time and vividly remember the days when x server wasn’t even a twinkle in their distro’s eye.  Well last night one of the members, James Taylor, presented the Microsoft Exchange contender, Novell GroupWise.

At first, I thought we would talk about the online collaboration tool, eGroupWare, but I soon realized that this was yet another network or system admin tool. So; I knew the content would be out of my scope of understanding. I was indeed correct on my assumption and found myself dozing off a little more than I’d like. I ended up leaving before the presentation was finished, but I was getting really tired and I wanted to get home bad.

Don’t get me wrong, the presentation was done well, but the content was not directly relevant to me – and it had already been a long day. I didn’t get a chance to ask, but being exposed to this product – it reminded me A LOT of Google Apps. So; I wonder if the folks at Google got their inspiration from this tool. It looks like a great piece of software if I wanted to run a solid nonMicrosoft house, but for the time being – I’ve switched to The Cloud.

Correction: When I originally posted this, I stated that GroupWise was open source. Whoops, my mistake. It most certainly IS NOT open source.

There are a lot of things happening in my life, but it’s not time to broadcast them yet. The kids are fine (all 3 of them) and me and the wife are happy. My full-time job at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is becoming more stable since I made a very hard decision about my freelance work with Digital · Alias. One can surely guess what I mean based on that sentence, but since everything isn’t final – I’ll keep it vague.

In the world of Linux, I’m getting very tired of Firefox not working out the way I’d like it to. It’s always ran very slow on my desktop (Fedora x86_64). I’ve switched to Epiphany (a GNOME project) and boy does that web browser need some work. Good thing is, it’s fast, bad thing is it’s very immature and I miss ALL the convenient features Firefox has. I’ll stick with it because I need speed more than convenience.

Social Life

I’m on Facebook a lot more now-a-days, but playing their casual games, such as: Mafia Wars, YoVille, and Metropolis. Funny; I realize that these games are a complete waste of time and they are ONLY fun in the beginning when you are trying to balance out everything.  I also see that everyone needs something to fun to do, even if it doesn’t progress your life in any manner.  When you play Xbox or PS3 – those games really don’t add to your life.  The same can be said about these casual online games.

Google Calendar

I’m using Google Calendar a lot more these days.  I’ve got everything from birthdays, tv shows, podcasts and FLOSS events.  Web 2.0 Expo is taking place.  I can see that it’s in San Francisco, but I surely can’t go.  I have a Weekly Joomla conference call with a local group titled, The Atlanta Joomla Open Source Meetup.  And so much more…

Micro-blogging

I have been micro-blogging like mad lately.  Unfortunately; I’ve been interacting on Twitter more than the Laconica instances.  I’ve noticed that there are a lot more mobile and desktop apps for Twitter.  As soon as I pickup on Python, I’m going to make more apps for Laconica.  That’s the social media I’d like to use the most, it’s FLOSS at its best – it’s just under marketed.

Pet Projects

As soon as I can free up so time, I plan on finally taking up some opensource projects.  I am going to start out by learning Python and doing some offline applications.  When I’m comfortable enough, I might then join a GNOME project or be more active with the Fedora Websites group.

You like my mathematical equation for dead playtime with World of Warcraft on a linuxbox?  When I first installed Fedora 8, I ran Wine 0.9[something] with nVidia’s proprietary drivers.  I had no problem playing World of Warcraft.  I did notice something though – that every time there was a kernel update – when I restarted my Xserver that things would be kind of haywire.  I would normally have to reinstall the video driver and then I’ll be back to status quo.  So; now I’m a bit more seasoned with linux and open source or non-proprietary software means a little more to me than before – and getting that to work with WoW has proved to be quite difficult.

The Free-be Process

First I’m going to talk about the natural progression of a user migrating from the “Windows/Mac” world into this vast ocean of the “linux” world.  I heard on a podcast that most folks come into the linux world for various reasons, but the consistent reason is for the FREE software.  It’s awesome NOT having to pay anything anymore.  As for me, I’ve been used to not paying for software for a very long time… I’m a digital pirate.  There; I’ve come out of the closet (on that issue, I’m really a heterosexual).  I haven’t paid for software in over 10+ years.  But over the past couple years my conscience has gotten the best of me and my escape from the underground is linux.

So; the natural progress is people want free software, later on when they become familiar with all this software – they are exposed to GNU and the fight between proprietary and non-proprietary software.  And that is where I am, my friend.  I wish to run linux with no proprietary software – well except for the NEEDED ones like Flash, etc.  If you’re running open source/non-proprietary software – you will have less complications as the kernel and operating system progresses and improves.

Getting WoW Installed

Ok; back to my dilemma at hand.  I installed Fedora 9 (F9) and I was stoked to see that Wine released their stable version, which is “one point oh” (1.0).  It’s a great milestone to release a 1.0 version and Wine has been in works for years.  I was happy to see that F9 had this in their repos.  I installed it and immediately installed World of Warcraft.  I had no problems with it.  I also installed the kmod-livna drivers for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  It worked because I was able to apply “Desktop Effects” and get the whole cube and wobbly windows effect.  But when I try to run WoW nothing would happen.  So; I ran the command in my terminal to see what the error messages were and it seemed to have not registered something with the Wine/Windows Registry.

I’m not certain which component is the culprit, but so far I can’t install any of my games using Wine 1.0.  GTA: San Andreas, Battlefield 2, etc.  I always get some freaky error and I usually just move on to other things I have to do.  So; I’ll try and keep a log of what happens, but this is my situation at the time.  I’ve done some Google searches and WIne forum searches, but no luck yet.

I’m a bit confused by the methods people go about reporting news now-a-days. I’m probably late to the game, but it seems that everyone is stealing, borrowing, whatever from each other and you have to dig down into 2 or 3 levels of blogs in order to get the one true article that was written about the subject.

I forgot how I found it, but the title “Ubunut 8.04 vs. Fedora 9″ caught my eye. I followed it to www.OSnews.com to read a small excerpt of a much bigger story found elsewhere. How long has this been going on? I remember when I first started reading GoogleNews, I noticed that they would have an intro sentence and the real story was somewhere else. That trend (whether started by Google or not) is the norm sharing stories.

I use GoogleReader and it’s amazing how all these supposed news web sites are basically fancy portals to the real news web sites.