I started visiting Brightcove a couple of years ago when Jeremy Allaire (creator of ColdFusion) mentioned it at the 2004 Macromedia MAX Conference in New Orleans. It took a long time before it became publicly available, and even then it seemed to be geared towards professional media producers and not something available to the masses.
I'm not sure when things changed, but recent visits have excited me as it became clear that Brightcove would make it very possible for non-professional media producers to get their content online in a way that was easy and looked great.
If you tried visiting my blog yesterday, you may have seen a short-lived experiment as I considered moving my blog from Wordpress to Blogger. My only real reason for trying Blogger is that I've really become pretty fond of Google's other tools and figured that I might as well do everything that I can in one place. I discovered quickly that Blogger is no Wordpress.
Today, Ted Patrick of Adobe found his blog's feeds broken as in Google's upgrades of Blogger, they disabled all RSS and RDF feed publishing and moved everybody completely to Atom.
Adobe put out the first non-beta release of the Flash 9 player with full-screen video this week. Brightcove is already utilizing it.
Try it out here…
technorati tags:flash, brightcove, adobe
Ryan Stewart uses Google Trends to compare Rich Internet Application technologies and shows that Adobe Flex is ranking best compared to other environments like OpenLaszlo. I ran his query then added AJAX and they were blown out of the water - basically flatlined at the bottom of the graph.
technorati tags:flex, apollo, ajax, openlaszlo
I've always been a map/navigation freak, so it's no surprise to me that I have found this geocaching quite addictive. I enjoy the creativeness of the quests. I like how each of the caches that I have found so far have introduced me to a place that I would probably have not otherwise visited. I'm also pretty stunned by how big the community around this is. Here's a couple things that I have learned in my short time doing this
I mentioned the term geocaching in my last post. Geocaching is a sort of scavenger hunt, or hide-and-seek game where someone hides a small “cache” and then puts information online to help people find it. The clues online include GPS coordinates to where the item can be found typically with some vague visual clues to help once there. My wife and I tried our first last night as there was one only a few blocks from our house.
I've written before about geotagging photographs. This has become super easy since Flickr has added a geotagging function in the last few months. Sometimes, this may not be enough though. Tomorrow, my family and I are headed to Maine and plan to do a little boating (cold boating). I was interested in the idea of taking my GPS and my camera and finding a way to link waypoint data from the gps with photos that I take.
The sour feeling that’s in my tummy this morning tells me that today is Student Vote at Lincoln Public Schools. This is the fourth time that we have done student vote online (we do it every two years) and I’d like to think that I’ve gotten a little better at it each time – until this year. Things have really felt like a mess this time around. The biggest thing that has killed me is not having ballot information until the middle of October.
While Flock is still my favorite browser, I’ve been working a lot with Firefox to see what I think of it. I like it. As is typical, I think that the appearance of the windoze version seems a little more polished than the mac one (which is funny since they used different themes for them this time). I think the greatest thing that was added in this version is a built-in spell checker that checks anything you type into any web form.
I attended a session today covering the use of HTML and Javascript with Adobe’s upcoming Apollo product. Among many other things, Apollo will allow web applications to be deployed as desktop applications. For this to happen, Apollo must have its own HTML rendering engine. To my great surprise, that chosen HTML renderer is WebKit (the same used in Apple’s Safari). Want to make a web application apollo-ready? Design for Safari. Cool.
If you haven’t seen a demonstration yet of Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect, you can catch one here (done of course with Acrobat Connect - formerly Breeze).
technorati tags:acrobat, breeze
Have you seen songbird? It’s an open-source application that looks a lot like iTunes. I’ve always thought it was an iTunes knockoff to give all those poor folks on Linux something to feel included with. This screencast on the songbird site showed me and will show you that while it looks like iTunes it is much different and if you like audio files on the internet, may deserve a place on your computer.
A newly available flash plugin supports full-screen video. You can download the plugin here, then try out some samples here. It looks great and is very welcome on the Macintosh where full-screen video is hard to come by. Quicktime doesn’t support running embedded movies as full screen. Real does, but few use it anymore and DivX also supports it but again is rarely utilitzed. Prepare to see it everywhere.
technorati tags:flash
This can be filed under “posting so I can remember later”. Darwin Ports has become MacForge. This is a super useful, albeit geeky resource for open-source projects that run on OS X.
technorati tags:macforge
A co-worker of mine sent this out today. It’s called “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language”. My favorite is CSS: “You shoot your right foot with one hand, then switch hands to shoot your left foot but you realize that the gun has turned into a banana.”
Read it here
I have noticed lately that the camera icon in my iChat indicated that my MacBook Pro was unable to host (or participate in) a multi-party video chat. Since I know that it is able to, I went looking for an answer to this. Here’s what I did to fix it: I opened the Quicktime system preference and changed the network speed setting from ‘automatic’ to ‘intranet/lan’. iChat must have been asking quicktime if I had enough net-speed to succesfully chat and quicktime was telling it that I did not.
If you didn't see the announcements at yesterday's WWDC keynote, you can find them at Apple.com.
Impressions? First, I was intrigued a little by the tag-team presentation format. Steve handed off to three other Apple execs throughout the keynote in a way that felt to me like a bit of a "American Geek Idol". Are they trying to find someone that has a bit of the aura that Steve carries? None of the presenters yesterday qualify -- especially Phil.
This morning (or noon-ish central time) Steve Jobs will take the stage in San Francisco to address the attendees of Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. This is the Apple version of the MAX conference (for those develop using Adobe products). I read one web site that anticipated a "flurry" of announcements. While I'm sure there will be some surprises, here are the three things that are expected:
MacOS 10.5 “Leopard” - Apple has made no secret that it’s going to be talking a lot about Leopard.
Yesterday, I think, Opera (the company) pushed out the finished version of Opera (the browser) 9. If you haven’t tried or used Opera before, this is a pretty good time to try it out. Opera could probably be considered the original ‘standards’ browser. While IE and Netscape were battling over features and market share, this browser from Norway was steadily creating a browser that followed the rules.
Opera has become a browser that tries to do everything, similar to the way that Mozilla suite (they call it seamonkey now?
MacPractice Uses Parallels to Bring Windows Dentistry App to MacMacPractice this past weekend announced an agreement with Synca Direct, Inc. to bring the company's Cadi dentistry software to Mac users via Parallels Desktop, which enables running Mac OS X and Windows XP simultaneously
I knew this would happen. While it is a great thing to be able to run both OS X applications and Windows applications on the same computer, I do not like the idea that some developers will look at this as an opportunity to not write software for the macintosh.
Google Browser Sync is a new plug-in for Firefox that will allow you to keep multiple copies of Firefox (home, work computers?) in sync. Your bookmarks, history and cookies are all continually synced. Very cool – If you don’t mind google having a running record of everything you do online.
Update: I played with it a little bit, hoping that maybe it would provide a nice way for a person to log into any installation of Firefox and make it theirs.
Dale Dougherty from O’Reilly created the term “Web 2.0” to describe the recent rebirth of web development that has brought us cleaner interfaces as well as AJAX-powered behaviors. As a part of this, O’Reilly has organized a couple of Web 2.0 conferences around the topic. Now, O’Reilly is trademarking the term “Web 2.0” and people are very angry about this. If this were a company like Microsoft, I would have no doubt that they had plans to either lock down the term in a way that nobody could use it, or they would popularize it in a self-centered way that would bring more attention to them.
AppleInsider reports that Apple is working on a new all-in-one Mac for education, to replace the phased-out eMac, and that Apple is targeting release in the "September timeframe" 2006. If so, Apple would catch only the tail end of the purchase cycle for the school year beginning this Fall, since many educational institutions, faculty, and students are already planning their next purchases.Mac Rumors: Apple Mac Rumors and News You Care About
Macy's will dip its foot back into the retail consumer electronics market again by adding iPod vending machines to its stores this fall. The company plans to install Zoom Stores robotic vending machines stocked with iPods in stores across 32 cities according to The Buffalo News. The retailer stopped selling consumer electronics after the market proved to be unprofitable in its stores. The iPod Observer - Now Playing - Macy's Gets iPod Vending Machines
Will Richardson discusses the difference between teaching kids to be ‘lifelong learners’ and ‘lifelong teachers’. Included is a video podcast from an elementary classroom teaching others how to do podcasting.