Brian Fitzgerald

The sony bean player has been discontinued after only having been out for six months. I don't know if it just wasn't selling or if it's about to be replaced with something better. I really thought that the bean was a great looking player (it'd be better if sony wasn't locked on to their stupid music format). Many are going to point to this as another product that the iPod has killed (and I'm sure that's a factor) but Sony has long had a reputation for just throwing anything they can dream up out there and seeing what sells. When you do that, you're bound to have products that don't move. Sony also seems to be in the process of evaluating it's product lines to simplify them and create some cohesion between them. As in the case of any corporate merger/restructure, the bean may have been a fine "employee" that simply didn't have a place in the new lineup.

Either way, if you are looking for a MP3 player and it doesn't need to be an iPod, you should be able to find plenty have right-priced options on your local electronic store's clearance shelves. 

It’s been in beta for nearly five years and yesterday it finally it version 1.0. It’s not my favorite browser but it’s a fantastic browsing alternative on the mac and I’m sure it has a lot of great things on the way.

Here’s a tool called TypeTester that allows you to specify a font and the CSS properties of it to quickly try some looks out before you incorporate it into your style sheets.

I’ve seen quite a few color schemers, but I think this is the best web-based one that I’ve seen so far.

Based on the meeting notes posted from yesterday’s Firefox team meeting, we can see what will be in the first alpha of Firefox 2 (release postponed two weeks to near end of February) and future versions of it. Here’s some of the things I’m looking forward to:

• Close buttons on each tab (like safari and camino)
• Providing a method of tag-overflow rather than having a huge number of unlabeled tabs
• Visual refresh is planned but they are looking to do this via a contest
• Inline spell check
• Ability to save your session so that all of your pages/tabs come right back to the way they were before you quit Firefox
• Better RSS integration with a possible RSS previewer. Apparently Apple has patented some of the things that they are doing with RSS in Safari and they don't want to encounter problems with that.
• Anti-Phishing (similar I suppose to what is in IE 7)

Ben Goodger (Firefox lead engineer) offers his perspective on the history of Firefox.

Here’s a page that will create a CSS layout for you. It is a bit more intimidating to look at than some of the others that are out there, but it has a LOT of options and would probably produce code that needs much less customization once you have it.

Word from Adobe is that Fireworks is an important piece of their web development product suite moving forward and that it will continue to be developed. WooHoo!!

Opera Labs has a new technology preview available for Opera 9. If you haven’t used Opera before, you should really give it a shot. I think it’s a little too slow to use for day-to-day browsing (at least on my powerbook) but it has a lot of features that make it worth keeping in your web development toolbox.

Apple has released a new 1GB version of the Nano for only $149 and has made the 1GB version of the shuffle only $99 with the 512 now $69. It sure would be tough to pass up the extra features of the nano for only $50.

I tend to post a lot about browsers, so I have created a page that lists many of the browsers that are available for those that wish to try out a few. With the exception of Internet Explorer (Win) and those that are cross-platform like Firefox, they are Macintosh browsers. As I have time to try and assess some Windows-only browsers I will add them to the list.

Dell has discontinued their DJ MP3 Player. I’m not happy to see iPod competitors go, but this was just another case of a hardware vendor quickly throwing together me-too product that added nothing new to the space. Create something great and people will buy it. iRiver and Creative aren’t selling the numbers of players that Apple is, but I get the impression that they are doing pretty well. They make very nice players with unique features.

Technorati has released some statistics regarding the Blogs that they track. The most interesting to me is that 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after they have created their blog. That’s just a little better than half. That’s pretty good in my experience. Here’s a summary of the rest of the stats.

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Since I haven’t been able to post for the last month-plus, here are some things I’ve wanted to get up here.

Regarding Browsers

• The public alpha of Firefox 2.0 (codename: bon echo) is scheduled to be released on Feb 10. What's in store? While I'm sure that they will always continue to work on improving the rendering, the focus of bon echo is the experience. Two things expected in the new version are a improved interface with more operating system ties and inline spell checking.
• Flock .6 is scheduled to be released around Feb 15. I'm not sure what to expect from this, but I have really liked what I've seen from Flock so far.
• Internet Explorer 7 beta is now available from Microsoft and so far it seems that it does not suck. There are parts of the interface that I don't care for, but the rendering seems to be very solid.
• Camino 1.0 b2 was just released and OmniWeb 5.5 is on the way.

Apple Goodies

• Garageband 3's new podcasting features are great. When you create a podcast it gives you a time-based timeline (instead of measure/tempo-based one). You can easily create chapters and export to iTunes. I've done a one-hour board of education podcast using it and am curious to see if it will handle closer to two hours when the board has a busy night.
• Apple's new web site tool "iWeb" is a fantastic tool for putting together a simple site. You can easily create online homes for photos, podcasts, movies and whatever else you might have to publish. So far I have not found good options in it for customizing the look of your site, but I don't expect that most people interested in a tool like this will care.
• iPhoto 6 is a great improvement to iPhoto. It seems considerably faster than it predecessor with nice new additions such as a full-screen editor and the ability to order greeting cards and calendars.
• I had the chance to use the new MacBook Pro and its really a fantastic machine. It is slim and I love the built-in iSight and included FrontRow/Remote.

Other stuff...

• Adobe just announced that they are working on universal binary versions of their applications but that they would be released as the next versions of their applications and NOT to expect a univeral binary update to current applications. I hope and assume that this applies to the products previously owned by Macromedia, although with 8 having just come out in October, that could be a long wait.

Well, I’ve been here, but my blog has not. An OS X update nuked my blog and I haven’t had the time or will to try to fix it. The problem? A config issue in my php.ini file. Why didn’t I think of that?! Ha. Just for my own future reference (because I know I will have to do this again), I had to add /tmp/mysql.sock to the mysql.default_socket parameter.

Told you this was totally obvious. Anyway, the great thing is that it gave me an opportunity to upgrade to MySQL 5 and WordPress 2.0.1.

ZDNet has published odds on possible announcements at MacWorld.

Xoops is a PHP-based content management system. Looks like Mambo.

Sony may be coming out with a new e-book reader and I think that this may be the time for it. I have been thinking a lot about the relevancy of newspapers today and always come to the conclusion that there is no better source for information today, but that the delivery of that content is not what people want today. I have little interest in subscribing to my local newspaper (or any newspaper) and I don’t often take the time to visit their sites to read the stories. If I could subscribe to the paper and have it delivered in a way that was portable, searchable and easy to read, I would almost certainly do it. I wouldn’t even care if there were ads as long as the content was made available in a way that made it easy for me to read. I hope that Sony releases something wonderful (and Macintosh compatible).

Semi-frequent readers of my site have probably been annoyed by my constant empty “Links” posts. The problem causing this has been a script that I’ve had running every night to grab new bookmarks that I have posted to del.icio.us and list them on the site. This script creates a post whether there are new links or not. I have disabled this and will just run it manually now so that I don’t have this goofy thing posting all of the time. Sorry ‘bout those.

2005 is over and 2006 is here. I haven’t posted for a while and I have a decent excuse. My wife Amanda and I had our first child on December 15. His name is Liam and he is doing very well and we have all enjoyed our time together these past couple of weeks. I’m starting back to work on Tuesday while Amanda has the rest of the month off. Babies have a way of attracting lots of family and friends and it’s been real nice seeing everybody.

My web goals for the coming year? 1) Continue working on site construction methods using semantic-xhtml and CSS. 2) Find some time to start learning Ruby on Rails. The language itself may be a bit of a fad (I don’t know) but the concepts that have everybody excited about it will be helpful in lots of ways. 3) Finally acquire some respectable skills with Javascript. 4) Re-acquaint myself with Adobe’s software given their acquisition of Macromedia.

• Nuvvo Learning Management System A hosted, AJAX-based learning management system that offers free accounts.

Adobe is expected to announce tomorrow the completed acquisition of Macromedia.

• Official Delicious Plug-In for Firefox Official Delicious Plug-In for Firefox
• A well-presented list of open source projects for the macintosh. A well-presented list of open source projects for the macintosh. The list is broken into two sections. The first section contains the most popular applications divided by type. The second section lists many more, less popular applications. The quality of

Mozilla hasn’t announced it yet, but it’s out there. You can get the final 1.5 for macintosh here.

Word on the net is that Firefox 1.5 final will be released today.