Ryan Clothier

If you're a designer whose inspiration strikes while you're on the go, Pantone has a new iPhone app for you: myPantone. The app provides the sRGB, HTML, and LAB values on each color swatch, and its cross referencing system lets users identify colors across color libraries. The app gives graphic, multimedia, fashion, interior, and industrial designers the tools to capture, create, and share Pantone color palettes while they're riding the bus to work, waiting on line at the supermarket checkout, or anywhere they happen to be. "MyPantone gives designers the freedom to access Pantone colors anywhere, without the need to be in their office or carry around cumbersome guides," said Andy Hatkoff, vice president of technology licensing for Pantone. "Now with myPantone's Portable Color Memory in their pocket, designers no longer need to agonize trying to recall an exact color." MyPantone gives designers access to all the Pantone color libraries, including the Pantone Matching System for coated, uncoated, and matte stock; the Pantone Goe System for coated and uncoated stock; Pantone Pastels for coated and uncoated stock; and the Pantone Fashion + Home Smart Color system. In addition, myPantone facilitates creation of harmonious color palettes by finding complementary, analogous, and triadic combinations for selected colors.

Once you create a color palette, you can view or share it with others. And, the app can extract colors from any image stored in your iPhone's camera roll or let you choose individual colors from an iPhone photo and match them to specific Pantone colors. For viewing color chips, you can use Pantone's slate of built-in backgrounds or you can use one of your own photos as a background. You can attach text notes or voice annotations, as well. Sharing options include sending color palettes via e-mail, sending palettes to other iPhone users, and sharing via Facebook or Twitter.

You can e-mail palettes as color patches, or as application swatch files for use in Adobe Creative Suite, CorelDraw, and QuarkXPress. MyPantone is available for $10 at the iPhone App Store. Designers can also share their color palettes with other designers by sending them to Pantone's hosted Web site. It is compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 or higher and can also be used with the iPod Touch.

Microsoft's acid-tongued covert blogger Mini-Microsoft offered up a report card on Thursday's all-company meeting at Seattle's Safeco Field, giving CEO Steve Ballmer   two zeros and accusing business division president Stephen Elop of "sucking the life out of the stadium." While Microsoft employees provided tepid tweets from the company meeting that pulled 20,000 of them into the baseball stadium and jammed AT&T's cellular network, Mini-Microsoft looked for signs that the company was tuned into the job at hand, understood the impact of thousands of layoffs over the past year, and how Microsoft might stem inefficiencies at the company. He must acknowledge it starkly. The evolution of Microsoft Windows Seven things to love, hate about Windows 7 CEO Ballmer was the first to disappoint, according to Mini-Microsoft, who hoped that the company leader would "come out front first, before any other Microsoft leadership, to speak the truth about the last year and where we are now. We had layoffs.

Ballmer got zeros on both counts. We had inefficiencies." Ballmer, however, didn't appear until the end, slapping hands with employees sitting close to the stage and tearing an iPhone out of an employee's hands and pretending to stomp on it. Elop faired even worse, drawing Mini-Microsoft's wrath for crushing the blogger's hope for short, sweet and powerful demos. "Elop. Baby. Steven.

Dynamics. What did I do to you to have that forced down my eyeballs? ... Geez. XRM. Really? Did anyone give you advice that this was a bad idea? If not, you're seriously lacking good reports willing to give you honest feedback." Mini-Microsoft had blogged before the confab on six hopes for the company meeting.

If so, keep listening to them. In the grading system each hope represented a point and when all was said and done the score was 1.75. "Hey, almost one-third realized," wrote Mini-Microsoft. The other hopes included "practical vision," which Mini-Microsoft graded out at .5, giving Craig Mundie, chief researcher and strategy officer, and Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, props for focusing on "practical aspects of product groups, research, and inbetween the technology transferring power of the labs groups."Mini-Microsoft's hope for short, sweet and powerful demos earned a .5. "Robbie Bach [president of the entertainment and devices division] did okay, but I can't say the demos blew me away," wrote Mini-Microsoft. Ballmer's zeros came from not coming out first to "set the context for the meeting in light of a pretty awful FY09 Q3 and Q4," and one for not giving a serious wrap up. The grade for Mini-Microsoft's hope on getting a good peek at new stuff came up .75. He called looks at Bing, Zune HD and new Laptop Hunter commercials "conservative." And the hope to see a new review system got a zero. And Mini-Microsoft had kind words for Dr. Qi Lu, formerly of Yahoo and now running Microsoft's online services group. "[He] might be my favorite techie right now.

On the up side, Mini-Microsoft said he was surprised to hear COO Kevin Turner, who opened the meeting, admit that the company had over hired. I was impressed with what he's brought together for Bing and what's coming and how he has focused the team and adopted some of the new technology that Satya [Nadella, senior vice president of research and development] was showing. Ever?" Who the hell thought we'd be feeling so good about our search decision engine?

The Palm Pre's WebOS browser is a relatively recent entrant in the mobile browser arena, arriving in early June of this year. The opening screen of the Palm Pre's browser contains your bookmarks and a combination address-and-search bar at the top. But the Pre's new mobile browser comes fully prepared for a battle royale with other leading smartphone browsers.

When you start typing a URL, the Pre's browser will look through your visited sites and try to match the string you're typing to addresses you've typed previously-so with luck you won't have to type the whole thing more than once. After you enter the URL that you want to visit, a persistent loading-progress bubble appears at the bottom right of the screen, which then becomes a reload/stop button. If you enter a search term, the browser asks you whether you want to search Google or Wikipedia, and then it directs you to the relevant results. A back/forward button floats at the bottom left of the screen. The transition during zooming isn't as smooth as on the iPhone, however. The page's title appears in a floating bubble at the top (it disappears when you scroll down). Like the iPhone's browser, the Palm Pre's browser can perform adaptive zooming when you double-tap a given area of the page.

The Pre's browser doesn't display a scroll bar, so it gives you no way of knowing where you are on a page. On the other hand, this method does allow you to load two pages side to side (or in the background). Flicking through browser windows on the Pre works exactly the same as browsing through multiple open applications (also displayed as cards), with virtually no limit to how many pages you can open at the same time. You won't find a button on the Pre for switching tabs either, as Palm's playing-card metaphor requires you to open a new browser window from the menu launcher in order to open a new Web page. You can also flick between open browser windows without being in card mode on the Pre, but only by flicking left/right on the touch-sensitive area underneath the screen (the option must be enabled from device settings). One major shortcoming of the Pre's browser is that it doesn't let you save images. On the iPhone, when you tap and hold an image, the browser prompts you to save it.

Diskeeper Corp. this week disclosed that it has developed of its most significant technological breakthroughs, which it said will prevent up to 85% of all fragmentation from ever occurring in Windows files system. The new software should allow for dramatic system performance improvements, the company said.

"Not only does this eliminate any performance slowdown caused by writing fragmented files but it means little to no system resources or power is later required to remove fragmentation," the company said in a statement.

A Diskeeper spokeswoman would not offer any details on exactly how the product will prevent disk fragmentation or on how it will be packaged. She said the software will be released by the end of 2009.

Disk fragmentation occurs natively in Windows file systems as data is written over time to various sectors of a hard disk drive's platter. A computer's operating system generally does not set aside enough contiguous space to store a complete file, so it places the pieces of a file in whatever available space there is between other files.

Such fragmentation generally slows the performance of a computer because it forces the read/write head to seek out the disparate pieces of data that make up a file in order to deliver it to users. Defragmentation utilities, such as Diskeeper's, reorganizes the data on a disk in order to consolidate it and store the data pieces closer together and contiguously.

For solid state disk drives, defragmentation can be a particular problem because flash memory has a limited number of writes. Thus the defragmenting process can shorten the lifespan of flash drives.

"Even with new storage technologies, the disk still remains the weakest link in system performance. Among a host of other effects, disk fragmentation causes system crashes, slowdowns, freeze-ups and even system failures," Diskeeper said in the statement.

Defragmentation evolved from a time consuming manual operation to scheduled tasks. That lasted for years until it evolved again to automatic and then invisible real time defragmentation in products like Diskeeper.

"It is time to evolve once again by ending fragmentation as we know it," the company stated.