Brian Fitzgerald

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

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 know we’ve spent a lot of time at LPS putting spell checkers in web applications when that functionality really does belong in the browser. Here are some things that I’ve done recently to make Firefox more useful to me (read: more flock like).

• Del.icio.us has a very nice new add-on for firefox that does a full replacement of the Firefox bookmarking system with a del.icio.us-based one. Now anything I bookmark in either Firefox or Flock ends up in the same place (and a place that is available to everyone).
• Performancing is a decent blog posting tool that integrates with Firefox. I'm using it right now to compose this. I haven't explored everything that this tool does, but it does give me access to my categories and lets me add tags.
• I'm using the GrApple (Uno) theme along with the Uno mac theme and with a couple of differences, you can barely tell the difference between Firefox and Safari (or even Camino once applied there)

There are plug-ins that try to account for some other Flock functions like tying into Flickr (flickrFox) and doing news reading (sage), but they don't even come close.

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.

Mozilla has made release candidate 3 of the upcoming Firefox 2 browser available.

technorati tags:firefox, mozilla

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

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

Contribute 4 has been released by Adobe. I was pretty surprised as Macromedia NEVER released a product without announcing them almost a month in advance. I have downloaded it and am using it right now to create this blog posting. That’s a new feature in Contribute 4! Don’t get too excited thoughâ??this is the most painful posting experience I have ever had. So painful in fact that I’m going to stop right here. I’ll use it some more today and write something more informative about it later.

On this blog, you will find increasing amounts of ‘religious’ news. I didn’t just find anybody, but have become the webmaster of my congregation’s web site. Since this blog serves as the center of the content I put online, it is unavoidable that content I collect for this relatively new site to arrive here.

Because I am also the webmaster for a public school and this blog is aggregated on a page there, there could be issues. Therefore, I will put everything that is non-religious into a new ‘non-religious’ category. This category has it’s own rss feed and will be the one that I point distrct resources to. Those that prefer the top-level feed will begin seeing much of this new information.

Since this post is a part of that non-religious feed, I have avoided names and links here. You can visit my web site for links to other sites that I’m involved with.

I’ve added my links back to my blog. I’ve posted about this a few times and I’m sure that no one cares, but I want my thought process to be here. I have long had my del.icio.us links displayed on my blog, but I have gone back and forth on including them in the blog postings.

It’s easier to say why I think that this is sometimes a bad idea. First, if you have a bad system, as I have had from time to time, you can end up with a lot of empty posts if you aren’t creating del.icio.us links every day. Second, if you aren’t posting but are linking, it still seems to be kind of goofy to have a blog that’s nothing but links (still preferrable to no blog at all in my opinion).

So, why put them in? Most of you reading my blog are reading it via a news aggregator of some sort, meaning that you are never actually visiting my site. So if I find a fantastic site and link to it, even those that are reading my blog every day do not find out about it because its not being included as a post. Also, not including them creates extra work. When I find something on the internet worth noting, I have to decide whether to create a post, a link or both. It is much easier if I just create the link and then let del.icio.us post the link at the end of the day.

So, that’s the story. I’m using del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks. I’m using the blog poster built into del.icio.us to create the postings and every day at 5pm a post will be created with things that I have linked to that day.

Thoughts, ideas? Drop them in the comments…

It’s a Web 2.0 application that serves as a directory to Web 2.0 sites. I wonder if it lists itself…

Adobe Labs has posted new information regarding Apollo â?? their upcoming build-an-application-out-of-html-css-javascript-and-flash development environment.

technorati tags:apollo, adobe

I was getting frustrated with a single sidebar on my blog since so many things were ending up too far down the page, so I have redesigned. I like this much better and it gave me room to add my delicious links to the side, so I will probably stop doing the link dumps that haven’t been working for me very well anyway. Enjoy!

I've mentioned here before that I started using the LAME mp3 encoder to prepare audio files for publishing to a podcast (if you are using OS X, you can use darwinports to install it for you). While it is a little usability-challenged since it's a command-line tool, once you have the settings figured out, it's easy to use. My big reason for not using iTunes to do this is that I was getting a lot of file clutter putting files into iTunes, encoding them and then receiving them again through the podcastâ??ultimately giving me three files. I don't want them in my iTunes library until I get them via a subscription like everybody else.

I thought that everything was going well with the settings that I've been using until I tried listening to an episode in Odeo and got a earful of chipmunks. Odeo, and a handful of other podcast subscription sites uses flash applications to deliver audio files through the web browser. The flash player requires that audio files be resampled at bitrates that are multiples of 11.025khz. This apparently is not a standard way that mp3 encoders work.

So, here are the settings that I have settled on for encoding mp3s for podcasts:

== lame --preset voice --resample 44.1 --nspsytune -q 1 --lowpass 6 --noshort file.aif file.mp3 ==

I got the most help on establishing this from the Hydrogenaudio forums and then tweaked it to work for Flash.

technorati tags:lame, osx, podcast, flash, odeo, itunes

The Israel / Hezbollah conflict has given CNN plenty of opportunity to use the Breaking News section of their recently redesigned site. I think it's pretty sharp looking.

technorati tags:cnn, breakingNews

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?! ha.) included all that one should need to use the internet. Opera sports a pretty good email client, a note taking system and a news reader. The new version also has widgets that are similar to dashboard widgets on OS X and Yahoo widgets (used to be konfabulator).

Opera is the only real browser on the macintosh that I know of that supports a true full-screen mode and if you work with CSS, it can emulate other user-agents such as a terminal or low-visibility display to let you see how your work will appear. The new version of opera can also respond to voice commands and read page text. One suggestion from Opera that I'd like to try is creating a slide presentation using pages, displaying them in full-screen mode, then using the voice recognition to have Opera navigate the slides.

Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004 on the Macintosh used Opera to do it's in-application page rendering, but Dreamweaver 8 now uses Safari (WebKit). Opera was recently announced as Nintendo's choice to embed browsers in their current Gameboy DS portable devices, ensuring that many youth will be using Opera for every day browsing and requiring that web developers consider it when designing sites.

So what's wrong with it? First, the UI is a little kludgy. Opera 9 doesn't suffer from the window overload that previous versions did, but you can still end up with a lot buttons trying to get your attention. Second, like Firefox, the application is not really 'native' to any operating system, so while it runs on just about anything, it doesn't run as well as applications that were written specifically for a single operating system. Third, many developers just don't consider opera when they are developing sites, so many sites don't appear as they were intended.

While I still prefer Flock for my everyday-allday browser, Opera is worth having and knowing for when you need to do something were one of Opera's many tools can help you out. Every web developer should maintain this as one of the primary browsers that should be tested against along with IE, Firefox and Safari.

technorati tags:opera, browsers

Today I have started the first serious effort I can remember in the 8 years that I have been with Lincoln Public Schools to clean out all of the orphaned junk on the web site that has collected over that time. I have just completed one of the smaller sections of the site. I figure I removed over 70% of the files that were on the server in the five hours that it took me to go through it all.

Lessons Learned?

1. If you are putting things on a web site that you know is temporary, make an appointment on your calendar to remove it (or at least to revisit the content to see if it is still needed).
2. Schedule a "Spring Cleaning" date for your site periodically. If I had done this once a year, this effort would have been much easier. I have scheduled 5 days this summer to clean the site and have scheduled one day already for early next summer (hopefully that is all that will be needed).
   

Every couple of weeks I encode the audio for the Board of Education meetings of Lincoln Public Schools an publish them in a podcast. While iTunes works very well as an audio encoding tool, it can be frustrating when podcasting. My audio starts as a track in a quicktime movie. I export that movie as a AIFF file, giving me a very large (1GBish) audio document. I then put this file into iTunes, right-clicked on it and chose to encode it as an MP3. Once encoded, I would edit the ID3 tags to reflect the artist/album/genre that the rest of my podcast has. Now I have two files in my iTunes library. Once uploaded into my podcast (I use Podcast Maker) iTunes would pull a third copy of the file as a part of the subscription (you should always subscribe to your own podcast for quality-assurance purposes). Finally, I have to remember to clean out the garbage files and get everything back in order. A real mess, I think.

Last week I got very frustrated with this and tried the command line utilty LAME to compress my files. This worked very well. It was just a little usability-challenged. I wanted something that I didn't have to pull out an instruction book every time I used it.

Today, a new version of Max was released that does what I need it to do. Max is an audio encoder that only does audio encoding (and does it well). It has a lot of input and output options and can play nicely with a few other applications to do tagging and playing. I'm really hoping that this will finally allow me to do everything outside of iTunes and leave iTunes to do what it does best, organizing and playing audio files.

technorati tags:lame, podcastMaker, iTunes, mp3, encode

The New York Times is sporting a new look–and it’s beautiful. They, like CNN last week, have gone wide (970pixels by my measurement) and have also centered (which I really can’t figure out why more big sites don’t do–everybody else does).

CNN has a fantastic new layout that is standards-compliant, wide and beautiful. The new site is 980 pixels wide. WooHoo. I’m for anything that aids in stretching web users expectations of what a site is. Monitors are wider, let’s use them.

Digital Web Magazine reviews “CSS Mastery”

There are so many “Web 2.0” companies that it’s almost impossible to track them. Here’s a poster that’s been assembled using web 2.0 company logos. It’s fun to see the designs and colors used. It’s also fun to just start going through them to see what’s being done by all of these companies.

What is meant by web 2.0? What was web 1.0? Read all about it here…

Apparently Flock has scrapped plans of making .6 a major beta release or they have decided that using numbers like .5.11 highlights the fact that these are betas. Either way, it has been a long time since a release of Flock was put out (outside of the hourly builds) and this new one is fantastic. Check out the new features here, then get it.

technorati tags: flock, browser

This is a list that showed up on digital-web magazine over a year ago listing those things that a modern site should be doing. While it's hard for most casual developers to incorporate these into a homegrown site, it shows that one should really consider some of the great content management systems available when building a site. Most good ones will take care of a majority of these items. In the end, you need to decide what is and isn't important to you and your visitors.

Offering regularly updated information (blogs, CMSs, etc.)

Increased efficiency in news and information distribution (RSS, ATOM, etc.)

Alternative methods of information distribution (email newsletters, RSS, del.icio.us, etc.)

Enhanced notification and announcement systems (pings, email alerts, etc.)

A place for your site's users to offer feedback and input (blog comments, forums, etc.)

Improved performance and code optimization (CSS, XHTML, etc.)

Multiple ways to access information (multi-faceted navigation, folksonomies, etc.)

Intelligent system to system communication (XML, SOAP, etc.)

Collaborative communication and documentation (Wikis, blogs, etc.)

On-demand support feedback (user-driven FAQs, click-to-chat, etc.)

Digital Web Magazine - News - Ten things your web sites should be doing