Via PCWorld. Flock, a Mozilla-based browser, that's getting a lot of buzz lately just went Beta this morning so I gave it a run. I'll say up-front that I'm not a social bookmarking freak, meaning I don't do the "Del.icio.us Dance" very often, though I do have some favourites stored there. Social bookmarking and tagging are really quite popular (del.icio.us, digg.com, furl.net), but the problem as I see it is that there are many many sites out there for that sort of thing. You either have to monitor all of them or you feel like you're missing out. Nonetheless, I do blog so I thought I'd give Flock a spin. Read the rest of this entry ...
Via Opera Watch. Opera has just released a preview download of their web browser Version 9 that has improved SVG support (including SVG scripting!). Examples of code that now works can be seen with the menus of my site as well as my online Tetris game.
I've had this happen a couple of times now, so I know I'm not alone: I monitor a lot of web feeds (RSS/Atom/RDF) using Mozilla Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" feature. Firefox is not the best web feed viewer, so I also recently started use RSSOwl, but my list of feeds in the browser far outweighs the list of feeds that I track using RSSOwl, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to export the Live Bookmarks to OPML for importing into RSSOwl. Thus, I haven't made the switch over to a dedicated web feed aggregator... yet... Anyway, as part of my morning ritual, I usually go get a nice and hot beverage, open up Firefox and check all my feeds to see if there are any new entries I might like to read. The way it's supposed to work, Firefox lists the most recent entries first, so I usually just remember the title of the last entry I've read and base my scanning off of that. This can lead to problems though. Read the rest of this entry ...
Check out Tex Avery's classic MGM cartoon Red Hot Riding Hood on Google Video. Nice! Not exactly a cartoon for the kids but still innocent by today's standards. Incidentally, the sexy character Red was the inspiration behind Jessica Rabbit in the great film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
About Google Video, I think it's coming along nicely. The quality of this video is about what I expected. It's odd, this video seems to be from a ripped version (as shown in the last frame), so I wonder if Warner Brothers (who owns the rights to the MGM cartoon library) knows about this. Shhh! Don't tell them!
Just last week, I posted about how impressed I was with Outlook Web Access 2003. On slashdot today along comes the story that MSN Hotmail is going to undergo a much-needed Ajax facelift (called "Kahuna"). The screenshots look very similar to Outlook Web Access 2003 but with ads, so I'm sure most of the code is shared.
The update is going public some time in 2006, though phase 2 of the deployment, rolling out to 200,000 "technical enthusiasts", is starting today. Hey, I'm an "enthusiast" too...maybe I was 200,001st on their list...
This is good news, not just because Hotmail feels woefully outdated after using Gmail for a year, but I'm sure this means they'll maximize their user base and ad revenues (and avoid holy wars) by fixing the broken bits in Outlook Web Access when using browsers like Firefox and Opera. Those fixes should logically trickle back to Outlook Web Access 200x and this would strengthen the case for alternative browsers in the corporate environment.... Hmm, maybe it's not so "logical" after all 😉