Firefox is now nearing the version 2.0 milestone, with the second release candidate being released last week and positive reviews already starting to surface on the net. The development team have apparently already started focusing their efforts on the next version (3.0) and are soliciting requests for features, you can even download alpha builds for v3.0 already if you are feeling adventurous and have no problems with stability 
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I installed RC2 earlier this week and have been pretty impressed with it so far with the following exceptions:
- Opening new windows in new tabs is awesome – automatically giving them focus is not!
- Only about 40% of my extensions currently work with the new version
- It’s great that each tab has a ‘close’ icon on it but why did they get rid of the original x in the top right hand corner? When I have a lot of tabs that I want to close it was good to be able to repeatedly click in the same location rather than hunting for individual tabs close button
Hopefully these issues will be resolved as more extensions update themselves to the new API.
As always when perusing the internet I am convinced that there are too many people out there with way too much time on their hands, a case in point are the twelve students from Oregon State who spent a great deal of time creating the firefox crop circle…
Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. Our team consisted of 12 people, mainly OSU students, and we carefully stomped down oats from 3:30pm Friday afternoon until 2:30am, putting on the finishing touches between 7:30am and 11:00am Saturday, August 12.
At least it gives me something to giggle at while I’m waiting for my processing to finish
If you are like me and are using firefox you’ll probably have noticed that your desktop has become a bit more cluttered now that all your downloads are being sent there. I’ve recently been cleaning mine up and finding some pretty wallpapers from deviant art to brighten things up a bit. I’ve managed to remove just about everything from there except the bloody recycle bin – thankfully there is help at hand.
Undeletable icons on the desktop are controlled by entries in the registry at :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace
in my case I’m trying to remove the “Recycle Bin” and the “My Bluetooth Places” which can be achieved by deleting the following keys
{645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E} - Recycle Bin
{6af09ec9-b429-11d4-a1fb-0090960218cb} - Bluetooth Icon
Thanks to Daniel for the info.
This is I think the start of something really big. As of today (14-July-2006) users on MSN Messenger and Y! IM will be able to add each other to their contact lists and pass message between the two networks. I personally only have ever had one friend (hello Leah) who used the Yahoo client but I know that there are a lot of people outside of Australia who do – I personally use MSN and Google IM and cant wait for the time when all these networks will be able to talk to one another.
In Australia the majority of people (at least that I know) are running MSN but when I was living in the states it was quite incredible the number of people who were using AIM as the their one and only chat client and had never thought about logging on to MSN (even though it comes pre-installed on their computers). A friend recently pointed out to me the possibility of using a Jabber based client (like gaim, or google talk) to connect to a jabber gateway such as http://www.jabber.org.au/ which then does the connection to various networks for you. While this is a step more sophisticated than all-in-one wonder client like trillian, which could connect to multiple networks at once, it still doesn’t provide the ability to have a single online identity with which other users can communicate.
In many ways the current situation is very much like the early days of email when individual ISPs had their own walled gardens and communication between them was unthinkable. I think that the breaking down of these walls will also help propel IM into a much more useful communication tool. Imagine not being able to email a potential customer because he was on a different email network to you. I think it can only do good things for IM clients aswell as people realise they don’t need the addition bloat that go with the latest versions of the proprietry clients (I’m looking squarely at AIM and MSN here).
The zooomr site looks like it is a fairly straight forward rip of flickr (which you all know can do no wrong in my book) and from the quick look around that I’ve had I can’t see too many new and excitingfeatures which would persuade me to jump ship. You can add sound to photos, but I can’t honestly see anyone doing that more than once for the novelty factor. It does add two intersting features though, the first of which is the ability to label people who are in a photo. This feature could be one of the most incredible things for photo sharing if it is done really well, and will be a so-so affair otherwise. One of the first issues is that suffered by all community driven sites in that different people will label things differently (some of my friends call me James, I normally go by Jamie however) how then to realise that Jamie Cook in photo 782 is the same as James Cook in photo 1089? And also how to tell the difference beween James Cook (me) and say James Cook the famous captain who discovered Australia? I did see a site a while back that claimed to be able to perform face-recognition on photos to tell you who was in them which seems like an admirable task but I don’t think it’s how zooomr will be doing this.
I had an idea a little while ago while doing some work with image databasing and searching. Never really took it anywhere but then noticed that this new site had implemented the same idea in a pretty neat way. The concept is basically that each photo is tagged with geo-spatial co-ordinates as it is uploaded and then other images which were taken in the same area can be easily called up.
Pretty simple concept but I think that it will help to re-invent how we browse and search for images – well at least it will when all cameras come equipped with GPS by default anyways I’m trying not to get side tracked but it’s a pet peeve of mine when reading about “web 2.0″ and the “semantic web” (or community driven web) is that all the information required to make them useful has to come from somewhere and no one really says where it’s going to come from except “the users”. Now I think I’m a pretty dedicated and pedantic person but the thought of tagging all the photos I have in my collection makes me go cold all over. I think spatial information, such as geo-tags collected automatically via GPS, would be a great way to increase the automatically available metadata for photos.
So in summary I don’t see anything great that I don’t think flickr will be implementing shortly anyway
After installing wordpress on my home server I had trouble getting access from both normal internet and within my home network, the trouble being with the Network Address Translation on my router. This article gives a good fix using the hosts file (which I didn’t even realise existed on windows).
Add the following line to your hosts file
linux – /etc/hosts
windows – C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
# if you are on the machine running the webserver
127.0.0.1 localhost www.example.com
# if you are on another machine in the local network
192.168.0.100 www.example.com
I installed the 0.7.1 version of the new flock browser yesterday and thought I’d post a few of my thoughts (and try out the integrated flickr features). The first thing I did upon setting up the browser was to give it my flickr account details – this is where I first ran into trouble. My girlfriend had her flickr account signed in and flock automatically redirected me to a page asking if I wanted to give flock permissions under her account. If it had been my account signed in it would have worked straight away but trying to change the login to my account involved a serious amount of fiddling and a restart of that portion of the installer (for some reason the back butttons on the installer weren’t working).
But eventually I did get it updated correctly and had access to all my photos from the photo strip which sits atop the tab space. It pops up my photostream with the latest photos first and provides some basic functions like favourite button and a drop down box showing which of your contacts has new photos available – clicking on any contact will display their photo stream in the strip. What I really wanted to try out though was the drag and drop function – which is why I’m writing this post really. To the left is a photo of centerpoint tower in Sydney which I took with my phone, I simply dragged it into the wordpress editor and voila… photo in my blog. I had been a bit worried that the WYSIWYG editor wouldn’t understand the html that was being dropped in but that didn’t seem to be a problem.
The only other thing that I’ve had a problem with so far is the built in search. As far as I can tell firefox’s quick search functionality has not been included with flock – my setup of firefox involves setting the google quick search to ‘g’ (I know David simply uses ‘?’), my process for searching is then 1) Ctrl-T (new tab) 2) Alt-D (highlight address bar) 3) type “g my search string” and I have a new google window with the search results I want without ever having to take my hands off the keyboard. Missing this little piece of functionality could be a deal breaker for me… I’ll have to give it a bit more time to see. I’m also a bit miffed with the search bar, the default is yahoo for a start and I’m not sure what has happened to the I’m feeling lucky search (in firefox typing a search into the address bar would give you the I’m feeling lucky result from google).
Finally the integrated RSS reader seems to work just fine, adding new feeds is easy and the icons are prominently displayed. The reader itself is very easy on the eyes with the one exception of squashing images, I read a lot of comics and when the strip is comressed 50% it makes it impossible to read the included text.
Thats it for now, I’ll put up some screenshots later if I feel inclined.
