Unwanted NineMSN Logo intrudes on OneDrive in Australia

I have been frequent user and supporter of OneDrive in Australia. A practical workshop appears in my first online course (MOOC) called The Cloud and You on Udemy.com. I had thought to create a more in-depth coverage of OneDrive in my second online course currently in planning.

Today I started experimenting with Camtasia screencasts of OneDrive to discover to my absolute dismay that the NineMSN logo/links appear at the top of the OneDrive, Outlook, People and Calendar components - definitely not something my international online students will want to see.

My first thought was that surely this display was optional but a short period of research showed these unwanted links are permanent when accessing OneDrive in Australia in any browser. This appears to be confirmed in the Microsoft community forum in the post 'Remove NineMSN Logo - Australia'. So disappointing. I have to hand it to Microsoft in the subtle positioning as it has taken me many months to spot it!

While the NineMSN logo is mercifully absent in the online apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote I won't be rushing to create my online course about OneDrive. So Google Apps/Drive here I come.

Unnecessary user pain on sites that fail to strip spaces

I just have to vent my intense anger with sites that fail to strip spaces when entering simple information like email addresses, user ids and similar. Surely it is universally accepted that spaces cannot be part of login names, email addresses, web page links and such. Indeed this is used by the vast majority of auto-completion tools on smartphone, tablet/laptop to terminate the insert action. You start typing an oft-entered text sequence and the platform prompts with the suggested complete text, and you accept by typing a space. Any other character kills the autocomplete action.

Annoyingly I am seeing more and more sites returning the unhelpful message

Not a valid email address/login name/...

when a trailing space appears after the text entry. Every person who claims to be a web developer should know the scripting/coding language they use to accept the user's input has a built-in library function akin to trim() which stips spaces and other invalid characters. Every site should do this.

This exasperated post was triggered by trying my hand at the tempting article entitled 'Could You Win the National Spelling Bee? - Test Yourself With These Winning Words'. I accidentally (yeah!) typed an answer ending with a space and was incensed at receiving an 'incorrect' answer. Of course it was my trusty Swiftkey keyboard app on the Nexus 7 that actually entered the correct answer but added a space.

Please, all sites accepting atomic text input should be stripping leading and trailing spaces. It shows sloppy coding otherwise and lowers the trustworthiness of the site.

Padlet walls URLs improve

It is good to see Padlet (once Wallwisher) continuing to add features. Padlet converts web pages into 'walls' where you can create and share information snippets such as links, files and photos. Today we see the ability to adopt a suitable user name and have that appear in the URL used to share your walls in your social media. So my small collection of cloud information gems can be found at:

http://padlet.com/MichaelRees/cloudgallimaufry

Padlet can generate your wall in a number of formats like PDf, Excel and CSV. Another generated format is a snapshot image:

Buffer overflows and collapses

As a keen social media citizen I have been using social sharing Buffer service free account quite happily for many months. I routed information gems to Buffer mainly from my preferred Feedly RSS aggregator and news reading service. At convenient scheduled times Buffer releases these updates to my Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ CloudScholar page. My tweets are automatically repeated on my Facebook news stream for my diminishing friends list on that service.

Suddenly last week Buffer started sending unsubtle messages:

You've completely filled the buffer for the individual plan, nice work! Upgrading to Awesome gets you more space...

So no more buffering for me as I can't possibly justify paying US$102/year for their 'awesome' service. I realise they operate a freemium business model but just terminating the free service after a fixed number of updates seems severe. I won't have started using Buffer had I known this limitation at the start.

Fortunately the currently free IFTTT service glues together much of the world's social media services. As it has done for several of my acquaintances IFTTT has provided a reasonably smooth equivalent to my lost Buffer service. Using an IFTTT recipe that repeats any of my tweets with a chosen hashtag, #cast in my case, to LinkedIn. I now have Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook covered. Feedly provides the same quick link to generate tweets as it did for Buffer so convenience is not sacrificed.

I have admit that so far IFTTT has not been able to send a tweet to my Google+ Cloudscholar page. If anyone knows how to achieve this please comment below.

Overall I am quite happy with my switch to IFTTT.

Telstra to crowdsource Wi-Fi across Australia

In a game-changer for users of the Cloud in Australia we see plans from Telstra for a nationwide and international Wi-Fi network. While not a free service, users are charged on their own broadband plan provided they opt to share part of their own Wi-Fi service in a secure way.

The Telstra service incorporates technology from Spain's Fon who offer a global Wi-Fi sharing network. It appears that Telstra will add about 8,000 new Wi-Fi hotspots in high usage locations across the country.
For Cloud users this is very good news as in principle it frees users from relying solely on mobile phone networks hotspots to access the Internet while away from home or work. Read more details in the post from GigaOM. Because of the lack of copper in the ground for my landline service I am forced to use the Telstra cable internet service. I can't wait to sign up.