Brian Fitzgerald

Design View : Andy Rutledge - White House Redux. The jewel here isn’t the design itself but his descripton of the process. It’s an excellent evaluation of audience, message, color and design.

I have tried to use thunderbird for spans of days and weeks in the past to see if it could make me a convert and each time I have gone back to OS X’s Mail.app after getting frustrated mostly with Thunderbird’s sluggishness on the mac. In the past week, Mail.app has been starting to choke on me quite a bit and with a universal version of Thunderbird available I have decided to give it a go again. The universal version takes care of my speed complaints, leaving me with my other complaint – It’s Ugly. Thunderbird doesn’t look too bad on windows or linux, but on the mac, it is a gnatsy looking program. I wish that the folks at flock would consider creating a version of it.

Opera Software today announced the first public Beta of Opera 9. This version includes Widgets, small Web programs running in their own windows that are fun, easy-to-use and live on users' desktops. The Opera 9 Beta also features support for BitTorrent, a popular file downloading technology, in addition to an easy-to-use content blocker and thumbnail previews of tabbed sites.

Widgets, BitTorrent, content blocking: Introducing Opera 9 Beta

As a Mac user, I’ve always been a little jealous of Windows users that can run just about anything full screen. I have especially coveted full-screen browsing. Sure, you can maximize a window the full width and height available, but you still have the always-present menu bar sitting there, and the application title bar (even if you choose to hide the status bar, navigation and address bars).

My envy just jumped a notch when I saw that the new beta of Internet Explorer 7, when put into full screen mode, hides EVERYTHING that isn’t a part of the page (windows media player-like). The navigation bar comes into view if you move your mouse to the top of the screen, but other than that your screen is 100% web page. I love it.

There’s my “say something nice” about Internet Explorer.

Does Asparagus make your urine stink? Ever wonder why?  ;-)

• USA National Gas Temperature Map » A color coded google-map-like map of gas prices in the US.
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J. J. Abrams (Creator of Alias and Lost, Director of Mission Impossible III) will be producing a new Star Trek movie. No cast or story has been announced, so it’s not clear which series/timeframe this will be targeting although the fact that he mentions that he wants to return Star Trek to its former glory indicates to me that it would focus on the original series. With that crew now old or dead, a movie based on the original series would almost have to recast the crew. Could a fresh crew and good movie be enough to launch a new series?

Firefox went universal binary with the 1.5.0.2 release and now Flock, in their continuous updates has started offering universals. I had drifted towards Firefox since it was working so much faster than Flock, but now I can return to what has become my favorite browser! WooHoo.

This is a long time after-the-fact but here is a pdf of the presentation that I gave at NDE a couple of weeks ago for those that wish to have it.

The Web Standards Project has been redesigned.

There are starting to be a LOT of sites focused on sharing videos. Here is a guide to many of them from publish.com.

Google has launched their new calendar service. I haven’t had time to mess with it yet, but it has a nice look to it and appears to be an easy place to create a calendar and subscribe to other calendars. There is a tour available right on the front page.

Toread is a new service that will let you easily email pages to yourself for later reading and easy searching. Set up a mail filter looing for the address that the pages come from and you have a fantastic page archive!

maczot.com

• protagonist: dashLicious » Tiger dashboard widget gives you ability to post to your del.icio.us account from any browser
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CNet reporters' roundtable ‘cast discusses Jobs’ role at Apple.

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).

CSS Stylesheet on one of Microsoft’s sites contains styles such as “StupidIEWidthHack”, “StupidIEMarginHack” and “fix for the IE 1px-ooff margin error”.

Here’s a photo an astronaut on the space station took of this morning’s total solar eclipse.

Ruby on Rails 1.1 is out and getting great reviews with it's built in AJAX support and much-improved active record feature. Got to get back on track with learning it.

Ruby on Rails 1.1: Web 2.0 on Rocket Fuel (web2.wsj2.com)

That's right! 64 GB!! Only $5,000. Consider an entire bootable  drive that would fit in your pocket. Backup your drive to it. Put your tunes on it. 'Course you can get a couple times that amount memory for one to two hundred dollars.

BUSlink's 64GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive PRO 2 Series - Engadget

Adobe under construction | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

 World of Warcraft down all day, Blizzard has no ETA

A beautifully rendered 3d movie of Optimus Prime transforming.

Wired takes a walk down the memory lane of Apple’s 30 years of Operating System glory. Ah, Multifinder…