Google Drive: a dead-end.

I have installed Google Drive this morning, hoping that we could use it as an alternative to Dropbox for an upcoming product we’re working on.

The need is simple: let users publish an RSS feed.

From a first analysis (I hope I’m wrong), it looks like even if I make an item in my Google Drive public, it doesn’t have a permanent URL, which means that it’s impossible to subscribe to it.

Now: companies have not been understanding links for all the story of the Internet, but you would expect that Google of all big and stupid companies would be the one able understand the value of permanent URL and how this empowers others to build things, layer after layer. The fact that you can’t easily link to an object in your Google Drive so that another piece of software (and not a browser) could read it makes this service a dead-end.

Btw: this is exactly the contrary of being open.

Rant #2

I love Skype. It’s probably the application I use most, if it wasn’t for Skype my company could not exist in the form it has today, spread across 4 countries (we are a mini-multinational).

When conferencing with multiple parties, the first 5 minutes of every call can be used in one of these two ways:

1. everybody is commenting how wonderful modern technology is and how amazing it is that we can see and hear each other across the world;

2. one of more parties repeat a hundred times “can you hear me?” and “no, I cannot hear you!”

I hate calls of the second kind.

Another bloated apps rant

About 20 minutes ago I decided to do a little job which involved choosing a photo I took last week and use it to create a banner for a client’s site. The mission required to start Aperture, select a project, right click on a photo, open it with Photoshop.

20 minutes later, I’m still waiting to be able to edit the picture with PS. Both Aperture and Photoshop (CS6) are wedged. Mine might not be the freshest of MacBook Pros, but it still has a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Due processor and 8GB of Ram, most of which is available.

Can’t really say why this is taking so long, but with every new version these apps seem to be slower and to use resources less efficiently.

Okay… it looks like I can finally edit my photo. 23 minutes. Not even in 1988…