Brian Fitzgerald avatar

Brian Fitzgerald

Gmail all the way...

I like gmail. I like it a lot. The interface is clean. It’s available from any computer. It handles attachments well. It offers a ton of space. It has great utilities available for OSs and browsers to inform you of new messages and it is very fast with search speed that you would expect from Google.

I’ve expressed my dissatisfaction with browsers on the Macintosh here before. Thunderbird’s only appealing feature in my opinion is its sameness on different operating systems and Mail.app looks nice and is tied into services on the macintosh but starts to act funny as it takes on more mail.

The only thing keeping me from moving completely to gmail was the need to manage many email accounts. I have my work account, a couple of personal ones and another couple related to projects that I work on outside of work. Using a client like mail.app or thunderbird allows me to pull them all together in one view and now gmail does too.

I have heard that gmail was working on providing pop access to external accounts, but had not seen the feature show up in my own account until yesterday. I immediately hooked it up to my .mac account and my project accounts and in seconds my mail was all coming into gmail with appropriate labels applied.

The only mess that I ran into was that I had years of mail stored in mail.app that I wanted to upload into gmail. I found instructions to convert my mail.app messages to mbox format and uploaded them overnight. This morning, ALL of my mail was in gmail (only using 20% of my storage). I had to create and run some filters to create some of the organization that I was used to in my mail client, but after a very short time I had created something that was far better than I had been doing.

Now my email is available anywhere (of course this can be said of any web mail client). I am notified either via the google mac notifier or the google firefox toolbar, it is available on my phone via google’s fantastic mobile client and I get a small view of my mail on my google start page. This is just another example to me about how the social web is not about people socializing but about applications being able to socialize.

links for 2006-11-30

What is a social site?

I created a post a few months ago about the social web. I’ve just come to the conclusion that my definition of the social web and the one that seems to be generally accepted are different. I do not consider a site that simply allows people to communicate to automatically be part of the social web. If this were the case, the social web would be anything but new as forums have been around for years and usenet predates the web (I think) and is still arguably the king of topic-centric discussions.

In my opinion, the social web isn’t about people socializing. What has the web ever been if it wasn’t about sharing ideas? The social web is about web sites socializing. Any web sites that pitches itself as a “web 2.0” site but doesn’t allow you to either integrate information from other sites into it or use information from it in other places is just a pretty face on an old site.

I’ll use myself as an example to show some of these ties. Some things that I like to do are create bookmarks, upload photos and create documents. I use delicious for my bookmarks, flickr for my photos am trying out both Google docs and ThinkFree for my documents.

If you want to know what people on the internet are linking to, delicious is the place to go. Their front page shows the currently popular links and can get show you some of the most popular link collections. If you only care about my links, it is the place to go as you can browse all of my links in very powerful ways. Want to know what I linked to during the NETA conference last spring regarding CSS? It’s there. The same could be said regarding internet-wide vs personal resources at Flickr and ThinkFree. What if you wanted to know everything that I was uploading? Without a single aggregation point, you would be forced to track my IDs at each of these sites. Instead, a simple visit to my blog aggregates my personal resources at all of these places into one view. I could, for example, create a page for a workshop or conference that would aggregate my postings to each of these services that was related to that event.

The geeky finale to this is that many consider blogs to be the start of web 2.0 and the simple conclusion is that it is because they allowed for the sharing of ideas in a new and personal way. This just isn’t the case. The start of web 2.0 was the creation and adoption of web service standards such as RSS, ATOM and other XML formats. The social web started when web sites began talking to each other easily. There are a few sites that really get this, but too many “web 2.0” sites just don’t.

Starcade on Brightcove

I don’t remember if I actually watched this show or not, but it looks familiar. Either way, its hilarious now.

links for 2006-11-28

Verizon begins to show advantage of Flash integration

Verizon and Adobe announced at the Max Conference last month that Verizon would begin putting Flash Lite on compatible phones. At the conference, it was spun as an advantage to flash game developers that would like a huge new audience to deploy their work to. Today’s BBC previews something much bigger however. Verizon has announced a deal that will allow VCast subscribers to watch YouTube videos on their phones. Potentially, these new phones will be able to start viewing content on any number of flash-powered video sites such as Google Video and Brightcove.

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One more ThinkFree Post

This is just a sample Powerpoint presentation hosted on ThinkFree. The posibilities with this are really pretty fantastic. I'm thinking about how a person's blog really becomes the one-stop shop for everything related to that person. My blog already incorporates my links (del.icio.us) and photos (flickr) along with my normal postings, but the ability to include documents (text, spreadsheet, presentation, etc) would be very powerful.
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Test Posting from ThinkFree Office

I'm working with the ThinkFree Office Online beta and one feature in it is the ability to publish documents directly to your web log. This would be really useful for publishing workshop/session handouts and presentation slides. You can see an example of a document right here.
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links for 2006-11-27

Useful tools this morning

I have really liked using textile for my post formatting as it provides easy to read and write code while also publishing very clean HTML. I have had problems with it when I mix HTML and Textile code as I do often on my web log. Textile's main alternative is similar language called Markdown. I have started working with it this morning and so far so good.


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What is LaTeX?

I’ve seen references to it often, but have never really understood what it was. Besides learning that it is pronounced Lay-Tech (the x is the greek “chi”), this post explained it use and benefits better than anything else that I have seen.

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links for 2006-11-21

New CF Box

I've been working today on building a new LPS WWW box that will use ColdFusion as it's primary scripting language since the NetCloak that we have used for around 10 years has been discontinued. Here are some quick notes of things that I have either learned or been reminded of today.

Thanks to Bret Hermsen in our Systems group for reading my mind throughout today and offering perfect help at the perfect time.

Non-Screen Media Styling

One of the greatest things about CSS is the ability to create styles for non-screen delivery. Digital-Web features has a new article called “CSS Styling for Print and Other Media”.

Google Code Search Adds ColdFusion

Google’s code search allows visitors to search publicly accessible code for answers. It now includes ColdFusion.

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Fireworks Design Center at Adobe.com

Adobe has launched a new design center on their web site specifically for Fireworks. If you are looking to get the most out of Fireworks, this will be the place to stay tuned to. There’s already some neat articles up there including one on how to “Create a night scene with Fireworks” and “Creating lens flares using Fireworks”. Interested in participating in the Fireworks 9 beta? You can sign up for that also.

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Wii Videos

Here’s just a couple of videos that show the Wii through its unboxing and demonstrate the gameplay on it with an upcoming game: Farcry Vengeance.

Wiiiiiii!


Number 17 in Line
Originally uploaded by cynomyso.
It was handy this year that the playstation 3 and wii launches sandwiched my birthday on the 18th. I've really had my eye on the Wii since its announcement though.

Even without the $600 pricetag that the PS3 is sporting, I've just resigned myself to the fact that I don't spend enough time playing video games anymore to enjoy the games that really need that power. I can't wait to watch it in a store, and it's that $600 that will keep me from wanting to pull out my wallet when I see a football game on it for the first time.

I knew that the Wii was going to be more available than the PS3, so I didn't have the feeling that if I didn't stand in line I wasn't going to get one, but I figured that I'd go see what the line looked like early on Sunday morning. I got to Target around 5:30 am and there was a line that stretched about a hundred feet. I really wasn't sure between the tent, chairs and people just there to stand in line with friends where I was. As the line started to wake up from what sounded like a mostly sleep-less night, people started to count themselves off and I appeared to be somewhere between 15 and 20, with 24 being available.

Around 7am, a couple of folks from Target came out started handing out tickets -- I got the pictured 17. They told us to clean up the area and be back by 8 at which time they would escort us through the store where we would be taken in groups of two to select accessories and games, then purchase the Wii.

By 8:30 I was back in my car with a Wii in hand. Only 3 1/2 hours invested, and I had a launch-day Wii.

The thing is a blast to play. The game that comes with it -- Wii Sports -- is simple, but very fun. It includes Bowling, Tennis, Baseball, Golf and Boxing and serves as a nice demonstration of the Wii remote and Nunchuck. The best thing about these games is that they are the types of games that are appealing to just about anybody and you need almost no instruction to play. They are just intuitive and fun.

links for 2006-11-17

Brightcove Video for LPS

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. Brightcove (and DiVX's Stage 6) allow for the creation of "channels" so that you can put an organized set of media online that can be browsed and viewed easily. The other nice thing about these channels is that it provides the content creator some ability to provide custom branding around the videos instead of having the hosting company's logo all over the place (like youtube, yahoo or google).

I have begun a new player at LPS. It will be a while before it goes public (if it ever does) but consider this your invitation to take a look and let me know what you think. I'm just going to start throwing whatever video I have access to up there.


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links for 2006-11-16

Bad Google, Bad!

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. Of course the biggest problem with this is that you just broke the feeds of thousands of blogs and are going to force millions of readers to fix their subscriptions. Bad bad bad...


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Flash - Full Screen Video

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…

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Rich Internet Applications - Compared

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.

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Panera Wishes You A Cup Half Full


Panera Wishes You A Cup Half Full
Originally uploaded by cynomyso.
Half Full? I realize this comes from the "Cup Half Empty" saying, but by itself it sure doesn't sound like much of a toast. "Here's to a tolerable life..." Maybe they are trying to save some money by encouraging half-full cups of coffee...