Web 2.0 Humor
What is meant by web 2.0? What was web 1.0? Read all about it here…
Great desktop pictures
Mandolux has awesome desktop pictures. Great images of beer and baseball. What else do you need?
Flock .5.11 released
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
What should your site be doing?
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.
Trojan for OS X
There may actually be a bit of a virus circulating for OS X masquarading as a screenshot from OS 10.5.
Opera Browser on Nintendo DS
This would be pretty fantastic even if the DS weren’t already a great gaming device. Opera will be releasing their web browser for the Nintendo DS as a game cartridge. The DS runs about $250 has two screens (one of which is touch-sensitive), Wi-Fi, stereo sound, a microphone and stylus. If it renders web pages with any speed at all, this could become one of the most portable, cost-effective browsing options available.
Another Player Bites the Dust
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.
Camino hits 1.0
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.
TypeTester
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.
Color Scheme Generator
I’ve seen quite a few color schemers, but I think this is the best web-based one that I’ve seen so far.
A Peek in to Firefox 2
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.
Inside Firefox - The Inside Track on Firefox Development
Ben Goodger (Firefox lead engineer) offers his perspective on the history of Firefox.
CSS Columned Page Maker
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.
Fireworks Lives!
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 9 Tech Preview 2 Available
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.
New 1GB Nano
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.
Browser Roundup
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 Discontinues DJ MP3 Player
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.
Growth of the Blogosphere
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.
Playing Catch-Up
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.