Rewind - the past two months

Work has started to ramp up and my team is now beginning to work on good sized projects. I'm happy, but sometimes when I look at the amount of time spent thinking about work, I treasure the few hours (or minutes!) I can get either to spend time with my girl, or just zone out and play Candy Crush.

Much has happened the past two months, but here are a few that I remembered:

Samsung S4 - My husband bought it a few days after it was released in Singapore. Everything looks positive so far. You could spot an S4 owner by the Jedi telekinesis action they will demonstrate when interacting with their phones.

Death of Google Reader - Thanks to a recommendation on Twitter, I've started using Feedly and I must say this looks way better than Reader. Way to go, Feedly!

Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In book, I've finished it! - I'm a firm believer of choice and women having that choice to choose what they want out of life and their career. We sacrifice the most and every time at the expense of ourselves. Read this book and start to lean in.

I bought a Nexus 4 - A lot of drama went into this phone, and this is just in the first month of ownership alone! I'll tell you more in another blog post.

I'm ready to get back to a Macbook, and this time I'm getting the Air! - I bought a Samsung Series 9 last year, and even though I enjoy working on it, I'm quite ready to get back to the Mac OS, so I'm waiting patiently for WWDC in June when they announce their laptops refresh.

Penultimate now fully integrates with Evernote

Evernote, my favorite note taking app of all time, has finally integrated their Penultimate app! So now you can scribble in Penultimate and get it saved to Evernote, seamlessly!

From 140 characters to 6 seconds, that's Vine

Back in October 2012, AllthingsD reported that Twitter had bought Vine, a video clip company. Then last week, this app was released, and I've downloaded it on my iPad mini. What you are able to achieve with this app lies somewhere between stop motion video and Viddy.

Here's how it works - you have 6 seconds to take a video, and what's cool about it is that you have control of every second of your recording. Tap and hold the screen to record, release to stop. This results in the ability to create a nice stop motion animation. Check out my first Vine below on how to make an iced latte. You'll get what I mean.

My verdict - I like it. It's easy to do, fun, and can be addictive. Are you using Vine?

My first Vine - how to make iced latte vine.co/v/b1XqTdrIpbW

— Bernie Chew (@berniechew) February 2, 2013

Vine

Blackberry 10 Launch

On January 31, BlackBerry launched BlackBerry 10 with two phones - the Z10 and the Q10. Z10 is all touch, and Q10 has a physical keyboard. As I followed the live blogging of the event on The Verge, I started thinking of why I would want to get a BlackBerry, and I couldn't really think of anything. I think the real target audience of BlackBerry is the Enterprise, because unless I'm GIVEN a BB from work, I will never be compelled to buy one.

BlackBerry Z10

Looking at the Z10
Tech specs - nothing fancy. 16GB is too little. Full specs here
User Interface - yes they have some nice integrations, but with iOS, Android and now Windows Phone platforms, these can easily be achieved.
Apps - Growing, but may be too slow.
Flow, Hub, Balance - nice features. I think I have to test that out to really make comments on that.

Would you get one?

Office 2013, the real deal

I stayed up late last night. Why? Because news about the launch of Microsoft Office 2013 was all over the news, and I got excited. Not that I've not used Office 2013 before. I've been using the Preview versions for more than 3 months. Ok, now I'm sure you'd be going, "what's so exciting about Microsoft Office ANYWAY?", and hey, I agree, but its not that there are any other tech releases to be excited about this month, so yea, that makes Office look way sexy. :)

So I went on over to the Office website and logged in.The monthly subscription for the Office 365 Home Premium is S$12.99 per month. There is also a one month trial that goes with it. I signed up for that and so basically what you get for that subscription is the following:

• Up to 5 installs of Office 2013 on your PC or Mac, plus some approved devices
• 20GB of extra SkyDrive storage
• 60 minutes of Skype

What Office 365 Home Premium gives you

Here are some points to note when installing the actual Office software on your computer. You need to completely uninstall any other previous versions of Office 2013 that you have. I went to uninstall from the Control Panel, and somehow it wasn't enough. Then I found this Microsoft support page here that shows you the different ways to get previous versions of Office 2013 out of your system. The first one worked for me, and I recommend this route as it seemed the least painful. So once you've done that, run the install again from your subscribed account and everything should work. It takes a while for the installation process to complete.

Microsoft Office 2013

Your next task after installation is to check to see if you have your 20GB of SkyDrive as promised, as well as activate your Skype minutes. I'd tried to also set up my Outlook with my Gmail account, but that seemed impossible. If anyone has done that please let me know how to do it.

I intend to spend my free trial just trying stuff out before committing to my subscription. I personally thing the price is a little too high, a better price point would be less than S$10 per month.

Did you sign up for Office 2013? Let me know your thoughts!

Cheers,
Bernie