flow

Today on The 404, we use Justin's absence as a way to introduce a new friend of the show, "Stoopid" Andy. Ironically enough, Andy isn't as dumb as his name implies as we all learn the man is quite the nerd. Andy shares some geek secrets on hacking DVR boxes and spending weekends reprogramming drivers.

Also joining us today is longtime 404 friend and guest Kenley, aka "Flow." We'll chat about Apple's initiative to trademark "There's an app for that," and other commonly used phrases countless people utter every single day. Then it's off to a discussion about the iPad hitting other carriers, which leads to a heated conversation about the inevitable fallout resulting from the iPhone's migration to Verizon.

Finally, we all try to come up with ways we'd take advantage of Taskrabbit.com, the service that allows customers to outsource common tasks. Of course, we can't think of anything that wouldn't be illegal, so if you've got ideas, feel free to send them our way.

Aqueduct takes a page from those popular classic pipeline-type puzzle games, bringing the same challenging gameplay to your touch-screen iPhone or iPod Touch. Like many online versions of the game, the mission in Aqueduct is to use available tiles to create a pipeline between a spigot and drain before you turn on the water supply. Aqueduct adds to the old pipeline formula by including conveyor belt tiles, teleports, door switches, and more, to create a fun and challenging time-waster that's easy to pick up and play wherever you are.

When we first started playing Aqueduct, we weren't immediately … Read more

Duoserve's ScheduFlow Online is a comprehensive Internet-based scheduling software package that is suitable for businesses as well as individuals. It can manage everything from contacts and appointments to teams and projects. You can even book appointments directly from it. It uses the latest cloud computing technology as well as SSL encryption to securely park your data on the Internet, where you and your team members can access it remotely without having to worry about server security and access.

This is a large software package, and you must first download the program's own downloader to access the 44.6MB … Read more

Cover Stream is a standalone app designed to help you browse through and listen to your iTunes music, using a visual, intuitive, and unobtrusive interface that's similar to iTunes' Cover Flow.

You can use Cover Stream through your menu bar, in a separate window (which you can toggle to full screen, or to float on top), or both, and the app makes it easy to flip through albums and playlists, play music (including standard controls such as pause, shuffle, and volume, along with a host of system-wide hot keys), build a "Jukebox Mode" queue (including a shuffle … Read more

Quicken Essentials offers numerous useful tools to track your finances on the Mac, but it falls short by leaving out some important features found in Windows versions. The interface has been rebuilt from the ground up to make Mac users feel at home by following the design and navigation schemes of other Mac programs like iTunes. All of your accounts, transactions, credit cards, reports, and program tools are easily accessible from the left sidebar (what they call the Source List), showing all the information for each in the main register window. Like iTunes, you can click and drag to expand … Read more

Hyundai has released preview images and details of its i-flow concept, which will bow at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show. The concept will be powered by Hyundai's first diesel-electric hybrid power train and should slip through the air with a slippery 0.25Cd drag coefficient.

At the heart of the i-flow's power train his Hyundai's new 1.7-liter turbodiesel engine that shares motivational duties with a yet-undisclosed electric motor and a lithium ion-polymer battery pack. Hyundai also makes no mention of what sort of hybrid system the i-flow will use. Judging by the size of the engine … Read more

This article initially misstated the price of using the TextFlow service within Box.net. It costs $9.95 a month, or $99 a year. Read the updated story here.

Here's a useful partnership: take a company that lets people compare and selectively combine multiple versions of a Microsoft Word document (TextFlow), and put it together with a company that hosts documents and has built-in communication tools (Box.net).

That's the news from these two, which on Tuesday are taking the wraps off an OpenBox integration that lets Box users use Nordic River's TextFlow technology right inside their storage folders.

The partnership solves one big problem, and that's wrangling multiple versions of a file. Instead of the onus being on one editor to herd them together by e-mail, they can just have each user edit a single copy stored on Box. Those users can then save the file back as a version of the file, which an editor is able to compare--at up to seven versions at a time, from a TextFlow page within Box.

Another benefit of having Box handle the storage is that TextFlow can now save charts and images from within documents. Previously, these were stripped out in the TextFlow conversion. Users can even move them around within the document, just as if they were in Word.

This has one big effect on work flow, specifically the bit at the end, which is where TextFlow's system fell apart. Sure, it was great to speed up the edit process, but at the end, you were stuck adding these document elements back in from a previous copy.

According to Nordic River CEO Tomer Shalit, who spoke with CNET last week, this same kind of functionality, which includes the images and charts within documents, will eventually trickle down into TextFlow proper.

The only other road bump--and one Shalit anticipates will be fixed later on--is that Box's system does not allow users to select multiple files and compare them--only multiple versions of the same file. This is the exact opposite of how people use TextFlow on its own, which is where some confusion may initially crop up with long-term TextFlow users.

The new feature requires that users be paid Box business subscribers to use it, since it takes advantage of Box's file-versioning system, which is available only with the higher-end plans. It also requires being a paid user of TextFlow, which runs $9.95 a month, or $99 a year. To that end, this will be the first tool for Box users to compare different versions of the same file from within the service. Previously, users would have had to get local copies of each of these, then run them through TextFlow or CompareMyDocs.

Correction 10:26 a.m. PST: This article initially misstated the price of using the TextFlow service within Box.net. It costs $9.95 a month, or $99 a year.… Read more

The entire point of workflow software is to make work better organized and more efficient. It's certainly not supposed to make things more difficult. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happens with ISS Smart Flow Freeware Edition. The program's unintuitive interface makes potentially useful features a tremendous pain to use.

At first glance, the program's interface looks nice enough. It has a sleekness to it and is a bit reminiscent of Office 2007 products. But users are soon confronted with Work Processes, WorkFlow Templates, and Document Templates, and it's not at all obvious how any of these … Read more