feds

Adobe adds customer functionality, receives criticism from partners

You've got to feel for Adobe Systems. It added what it thought was a feature to some of its products and instead discovered it added a land mine. As reported in today's Wall Street Journal, Adobe added a new button to some of its software that lets customers transfer their documents to a FedEx Kinko's for printing. Sounds good, right?… Read more

Displays have a long way to go

Today I take my lead from a Reuters article that describes two alternative display technologies that may some day replace (or at least augment) LCDs in mainstream computer systems.

Both are on the market today. OLED (organic light-emitting display) technology, used on some cellphones, creates what amounts to an array of tiny LEDs. This approach is theoretically superior to the way LCDs work, which is to combine a white backlight with colored filters and tiny shutters (the liquid crystals) for each pixel. All the light generated by the OLED is visible to the user, but most of the light in … Read more

Print stuff before you get to FedEx Kinkos with Print Online

Printing at a FedEx Kinko's can be a real pain. You have to deal with a foreign computer and pray that its software is working, which can be tough if you've got a Word 2003 file that won't open in Word 2000. To improve this experience, FedEx Kinko's is rolling out Print Online, a Web-based application that lets you print out various documents from your own computer. You can also pay for things online, which means not having to deal with loading up a special card with the funds to get the job done.

Print Online … Read more

Wake up to your widgets

Enough already with the combo clock-weather stations. They've become as commonplace as the $6.99 digital alarm clocks behind the counter at Walgreens, next to the batteries and razor blades.

This uber-clock, by contrast, gives you the stuff you really want to know when you wake up: stock news, traffic bulletins, the Monday Night Football score and the latest on Britney's divorce and sex tape scandal. And you can set your MP3 tunes or Internet radio for the alarm. As its name implies, the award-winning "WidgetStation" displays your custom widget feeds on one of its two … Read more