Thursday, June 29, 2006
My fave video sharing site
Is Grouper.
It's very flexible: you can upload in any format you want and it will encode your video in WM9 and the lastest Flash Video 8 codec. If don't want to upload a large file, you can download a client to encode your video on your desktop and then send the finished, compressed file. You can also edit video, change the sound track and embed still images.
The site has a neat AJAX interface. For example, when you sign up, you do it in a small box in the page. When done, you're still on the same page (say a video you were watching), but without reloading you're now a member and can access member facilities.
There's also a host of video sharing features - the usual such as html snippets to embed a video in a page (e.g. a blog), but there's also direct intergration with Blogger, MySpace and Wordpress which makes sharing interesting stuff you find a snap.
In all, Grouper has more features than YouTube but feels just as easy - if not easier - to use. It's certainly more flexible. Well worth a look if you're looking for a video host.
It's very flexible: you can upload in any format you want and it will encode your video in WM9 and the lastest Flash Video 8 codec. If don't want to upload a large file, you can download a client to encode your video on your desktop and then send the finished, compressed file. You can also edit video, change the sound track and embed still images.
The site has a neat AJAX interface. For example, when you sign up, you do it in a small box in the page. When done, you're still on the same page (say a video you were watching), but without reloading you're now a member and can access member facilities.
There's also a host of video sharing features - the usual such as html snippets to embed a video in a page (e.g. a blog), but there's also direct intergration with Blogger, MySpace and Wordpress which makes sharing interesting stuff you find a snap.
In all, Grouper has more features than YouTube but feels just as easy - if not easier - to use. It's certainly more flexible. Well worth a look if you're looking for a video host.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Run Opera 9 from a USB drive
Portable Opera 9 - very useful! Opera isn't commonly installed on computers, but once you're used to its power and flexibility you can feel lost without it. This will help!
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Social networks + Ziki, an alternative
There is a huge number of "social network" sites - sites where you can create a profile page for yourself explaining who you are and what you like, show pictures, and (sometimes) keep a blog. They're "social" as you can add lists of friends who are also on the site to your page, and be updated when their pages are updated.
A quick and probably incomplete list of all the social sites I can think of right now:
MySpace
Bebo
Orkut
Friendster
LiveJournal
Xanga
Yahoo 360
Vox
Tagworld
AIMpages
Facebook
Some sites have been around for longer than others, but the market is enjoying strong growth as under 25s, in particular, embrace technology and specifically the Internet and combine it with their social lives. They are another way to express one's personality, something so important to young people as they begin to find their place in the world and want to define themselves and make their mark.
They all subscribe to the basic principles I set out above, with some minor differences between them in things like the extent you are able to customize the look of your pages, their use of AJAX, photo-sharing systems, and the "plugins" you can use. Which one you actually use is more often than not down to the "network effect" - you use the site the majority of your friends are already using.
In my case, that's Facebook, but it could easily have been any of them. My first invite came from a Friendster user while I've had accounts on both Orkut and Yahoo 360. It just so happens that Facebook spread like wildfire through my university, and now almost everyone I know uses it! It's one of the few sites that sadly lacks blogs though, so it's not great for keeping up to date with what everyone is doing.
(I do wish there was a system where I could have perhaps an "aggregated friends list" - a list of my friends from across all social networks, and updates of when their pages change. Perhaps PeopleAggregator will do this.)
Which social network would I prefer to use if I have free choice? As it happens - none of them.
I prefer to use specific tools for specific purposes. So in my case, I have blogs on Blogger, photos on Flickr and store files in box.net. Of course, they're all discrete, seperate services, but they all also publish RSS. This is where Ziki comes in.
Ziki is like an RSS aggregator that you can set up for your own personal feeds to create a single web page (and feed) for your online presence. You can send the feeds of all your online activities - your latest blog posts, pictures, bookmarks, calendar, uploaded files etc. - to one place, which other people can then monitor via their feed readers or by visiting your Ziki page.
It also supports tagging of people enabling discovery, the building of a network of friend's Zikis to be listed on your Ziki, and you can complete a social network-like profile to go with your Ziki.
This is the solution I prefer. At the moment, Ziki only has some 1,600 users and like all the best things, it has a slightly steep learning curve that may prevent it ever becoming as popular as more straightfoward social networking sites. But it's certainly my favourite.
A quick and probably incomplete list of all the social sites I can think of right now:
Some sites have been around for longer than others, but the market is enjoying strong growth as under 25s, in particular, embrace technology and specifically the Internet and combine it with their social lives. They are another way to express one's personality, something so important to young people as they begin to find their place in the world and want to define themselves and make their mark.
They all subscribe to the basic principles I set out above, with some minor differences between them in things like the extent you are able to customize the look of your pages, their use of AJAX, photo-sharing systems, and the "plugins" you can use. Which one you actually use is more often than not down to the "network effect" - you use the site the majority of your friends are already using.
In my case, that's Facebook, but it could easily have been any of them. My first invite came from a Friendster user while I've had accounts on both Orkut and Yahoo 360. It just so happens that Facebook spread like wildfire through my university, and now almost everyone I know uses it! It's one of the few sites that sadly lacks blogs though, so it's not great for keeping up to date with what everyone is doing.
(I do wish there was a system where I could have perhaps an "aggregated friends list" - a list of my friends from across all social networks, and updates of when their pages change. Perhaps PeopleAggregator will do this.)
Which social network would I prefer to use if I have free choice? As it happens - none of them.
I prefer to use specific tools for specific purposes. So in my case, I have blogs on Blogger, photos on Flickr and store files in box.net. Of course, they're all discrete, seperate services, but they all also publish RSS. This is where Ziki comes in.
Ziki is like an RSS aggregator that you can set up for your own personal feeds to create a single web page (and feed) for your online presence. You can send the feeds of all your online activities - your latest blog posts, pictures, bookmarks, calendar, uploaded files etc. - to one place, which other people can then monitor via their feed readers or by visiting your Ziki page.
It also supports tagging of people enabling discovery, the building of a network of friend's Zikis to be listed on your Ziki, and you can complete a social network-like profile to go with your Ziki.
This is the solution I prefer. At the moment, Ziki only has some 1,600 users and like all the best things, it has a slightly steep learning curve that may prevent it ever becoming as popular as more straightfoward social networking sites. But it's certainly my favourite.
Monday, June 26, 2006
How to restore the Digg 2.0 look to Digg v3
Like many, I don't like the new look Digg has been given - navigation on the left, ads on the right, content squeezed into a narrow column in the middle. However there is a way - using Opera 9 - to improve the appearence of the site:
- Copy and paste the following into notepad:
#top_ad, .banner_ad {
display: none !important;
}
#contents, #sidebar {
float: left !important;
border: none !important;
background: none !important;
}
#container {
background: none !important;
}
#sidebar {
background: url(/img/sidebar-top.gif) 155px 0 no-repeat;
padding: 20px 0 1em 35px !important;
background-position: 0 0; }
h3 a {
text-decoration: none;
background: url(/img/link-line.gif) repeat-x 0 95%;
} - Save the file as "digg.css", making sure to select "all files" in the "Save as type" drop-down
- In Opera, right-click anywhere on a Digg page and select "Edit site preferences"
- Click on the "Display" tab then chose your digg.css file in the "My style sheet" box and click OK.
- Close and restart Opera. The navigation bar should now be on the right with the content on the left.
Flickr and YouTube's communities
I've been spending some time browsing YouTube today. One thing really stood out for me: the quality of the comments on YouTube are much lower than on Flickr, full of silly comments and text speak. It seems that the YouTube community isn't quite as "grown-up" as Flickr's, probably reflecting the nature of the media. Much of the commentary on Flickr revolves around high-quality photography, but there doesn't seem to be a video equivalent - most vidoes are recordings of pretty mundane things or "mash-ups" with little artistic value.
YouTube is technically a very good site and if I were looking for a video host, I'd almost certainly use it. I just prefer the medium of the still image to the moving one.
YouTube is technically a very good site and if I were looking for a video host, I'd almost certainly use it. I just prefer the medium of the still image to the moving one.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Opera 9 is out
Opera 9 has been released. The upgrade was fast and painless.
Outwardly it appears identical to 8.5, but it's under the surface that the main changes have taken place: it seems much better at handling AJAX, CSS etc., and the rendering of "web 2.0" sites is much improved. For instance: Google Calendars now works correctly, and full posting optons are available in Blogger. I had been using Firefox occasionally to access sites that were not happy in Opera; it looks like I will be doing this much less.
Opera's website deserves a mention. I love what they have done with their branding and style, using large dramatic pictures. It's the best product website I've ever seen. Another neat touch is that there's only one version of the Opera 9 installer file - an "international" version that includes all languages, and you chose your language during installation. Much better than picking the right installer file from a long list.
Opera 9 comes highly recommended.
Outwardly it appears identical to 8.5, but it's under the surface that the main changes have taken place: it seems much better at handling AJAX, CSS etc., and the rendering of "web 2.0" sites is much improved. For instance: Google Calendars now works correctly, and full posting optons are available in Blogger. I had been using Firefox occasionally to access sites that were not happy in Opera; it looks like I will be doing this much less.
Opera's website deserves a mention. I love what they have done with their branding and style, using large dramatic pictures. It's the best product website I've ever seen. Another neat touch is that there's only one version of the Opera 9 installer file - an "international" version that includes all languages, and you chose your language during installation. Much better than picking the right installer file from a long list.
Opera 9 comes highly recommended.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Office: online vs. offline
Some people think the future of the office app is online. They are looking to apps such as Writely (for word processing) and NumSum (for spread sheets) to pioneer the development and to "crush" MS Office. Google recently bought Writely, and is working on a Google Spreadsheet. In fact, there are already quite well developed browser-based suites out there - take a look at ThinkFree, which has been going since 2001 (although they use Java instead of AJAX, so aren't as "cool".)
I've used many of these. But I've also downloaded the Office 2007 beta.
The online apps suffer from many flaws. First, they only work if you're online. Believe or not, there are still times and places in this world where you can't get on the net. Then there is the cross-compatibilty issues of web apps: their heavy use of javascript means they'll often fail in some browsers. The large Java-based apps take a long time to load. Finally, and most critically: they're lame.
The online apps are just about good enough for writing simple letters or maybe summing totals in a spreadsheet (NumSum even try to suggest that having a wide variety of features is a problem!). Writely, NumSum and the new Google Spreadsheet would be useful for quickly sharing simple bits of information, perhaps within a club or sports team for example. "Mom and pop" may well find these more accessible - certainly cheaper - than a full office suite.
However they are useless for anything complex, even something as straight foward as a school assignment using styles, headers, table of contents, perhaps some tables and graphs etc. Maybe one day they will rival the functionality of desktop apps, but that day is a long time away. The writing is most definitely not on the wall, as some say.
If anything, the day web-based apps replace office suite will never arrive, for if they were to fully match their desktop-based brethen, they would have to become their brethen. There's no magic in javascript that means it can do what C can in a fraction of the code.
Back to Office. Office 2007 is an incredible piece of software. Its new interface is a joy to use and is far more intuitive than the old buttons-and-menus interface. It's certainly the biggest change in the suite's history - 2003 resembles 2.0 (which I still have) in many ways - but there's practically no learning curve to it. It's so much easier to find and use functions, and is the most compelling upgrade to Office since 2000. Additionally, Office 2007 loads and closes faster than its predecessors - impressive.
This is perhaps some people wish Sun had done with OpenOffice.org/Star Office's interface. But there's a good reason why OOo/SO is just a (poor) clone of Office 2003: it costs a huge amount of money and takes a large skills base to do sufficient testing to ensure a radical new interface actually works. Microsoft has these resources; Sun does not! If Sun had attempted to come up with a new interpretation of the office suite, I doubt it would have done a good job.
But what if you want to collaborate on work? Well, people often want to share documents, and network drives have always made that easy within the office environment. For more advancded use there's Microsoft's Sharepoint. The likes of box.net make sharing of files across the wider internet easy for anyone, too. Office has versioning functionality so it's easy to see who has done what.
Most importantly though, the best work isn't done by two people sitting at the same keyboard (which sometimes seems to be the logical conclusion of the hype of collaboration). The best work comes from letting one person who's qualified for the job get on with it, and then submit the work to peer review in one form or another. It's not new nor sexy, but there it is.
I've used many of these. But I've also downloaded the Office 2007 beta.
The online apps suffer from many flaws. First, they only work if you're online. Believe or not, there are still times and places in this world where you can't get on the net. Then there is the cross-compatibilty issues of web apps: their heavy use of javascript means they'll often fail in some browsers. The large Java-based apps take a long time to load. Finally, and most critically: they're lame.
The online apps are just about good enough for writing simple letters or maybe summing totals in a spreadsheet (NumSum even try to suggest that having a wide variety of features is a problem!). Writely, NumSum and the new Google Spreadsheet would be useful for quickly sharing simple bits of information, perhaps within a club or sports team for example. "Mom and pop" may well find these more accessible - certainly cheaper - than a full office suite.
However they are useless for anything complex, even something as straight foward as a school assignment using styles, headers, table of contents, perhaps some tables and graphs etc. Maybe one day they will rival the functionality of desktop apps, but that day is a long time away. The writing is most definitely not on the wall, as some say.
If anything, the day web-based apps replace office suite will never arrive, for if they were to fully match their desktop-based brethen, they would have to become their brethen. There's no magic in javascript that means it can do what C can in a fraction of the code.
Back to Office. Office 2007 is an incredible piece of software. Its new interface is a joy to use and is far more intuitive than the old buttons-and-menus interface. It's certainly the biggest change in the suite's history - 2003 resembles 2.0 (which I still have) in many ways - but there's practically no learning curve to it. It's so much easier to find and use functions, and is the most compelling upgrade to Office since 2000. Additionally, Office 2007 loads and closes faster than its predecessors - impressive.
This is perhaps some people wish Sun had done with OpenOffice.org/Star Office's interface. But there's a good reason why OOo/SO is just a (poor) clone of Office 2003: it costs a huge amount of money and takes a large skills base to do sufficient testing to ensure a radical new interface actually works. Microsoft has these resources; Sun does not! If Sun had attempted to come up with a new interpretation of the office suite, I doubt it would have done a good job.
But what if you want to collaborate on work? Well, people often want to share documents, and network drives have always made that easy within the office environment. For more advancded use there's Microsoft's Sharepoint. The likes of box.net make sharing of files across the wider internet easy for anyone, too. Office has versioning functionality so it's easy to see who has done what.
Most importantly though, the best work isn't done by two people sitting at the same keyboard (which sometimes seems to be the logical conclusion of the hype of collaboration). The best work comes from letting one person who's qualified for the job get on with it, and then submit the work to peer review in one form or another. It's not new nor sexy, but there it is.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Tracking blog conversations
I've recently trialled two potential solutions to the problem of tracking comments on diverse blogs: coComments and co.mments. Both use javascript bookmarklets to track conversations.
It wasn't tough to decide between them: coComments is crippled; co.mments is not! Let me explain: coComments only tracks posts from other coComments users. So if someone posts to a conversation you're "tracking", but they're not a coComment user, you don't get notified. That makes coComments rather useless.
Co.mments, on the other hand, simply tracks new posts on whatever page you are viewing when you click the bookmarklet - i.e. any any new posts, not just other co.mment users. (Both, incidently, offer RSS feeds of new posts.)
Co.mment's website is also a lot simpler to navigate. CoComment's website looks great with plenty of AJAX, and many geeks are suckers for eye candy, but there's a clear winner in functionality here.
It wasn't tough to decide between them: coComments is crippled; co.mments is not! Let me explain: coComments only tracks posts from other coComments users. So if someone posts to a conversation you're "tracking", but they're not a coComment user, you don't get notified. That makes coComments rather useless.
Co.mments, on the other hand, simply tracks new posts on whatever page you are viewing when you click the bookmarklet - i.e. any any new posts, not just other co.mment users. (Both, incidently, offer RSS feeds of new posts.)
Co.mment's website is also a lot simpler to navigate. CoComment's website looks great with plenty of AJAX, and many geeks are suckers for eye candy, but there's a clear winner in functionality here.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Beta? Alpha, more like...
Although with web services it's very easy to release a product and update it quickly (without having to wait for users to download and install new software), sometimes companies promote products way before they're ready.
ScanR is a case in point. A very good idea (aren't they all?!), it offers the service of converting digital images (from digital cameras and camera phones) into PDF documents. The service has been running and under promotion for some months, and the quality of the output is very good (documents look like a flat-bed scan of a good photocopy of the original). It would be very useful in my drive to ditch paper.
There's just one slight flaw. You can scan a multi-page documents by taking a picture of each page in turn and sending them as attachments on the same e-mail. The flaw? Pages are returned out-of-order, requiring the use of software such as the free PDFill PDF Tools PDF editor to re-order the pages. This bug is "known", and will be fixed, but no timescale for the fix is available.
This seriously hampers the service as it stands.
It's also far from clear which way round you should scan documents - A4 needs to be scanned in landscape, so in order to make sure your scans come back the right way up, should you have the top of the document on the left or the right of the frame? As it turns out, it's camera dependent, so you need to use trial-and-error to find which is the right orieentation for you. However, once you've found it, it should stay the same for your camera.
ScanR has the - here's that word again - potential to be a very valuable service, but right now it's pretty crippled, and rather more worthy of alpha status than its current beta tag. The team behind the service really should have fixed show-stopper bugs like the page ordering before releasing and promoting ScanR.
Oh and, while talking about PDFs, let me recommend the free Foxit PDF reader. It's very small (<1Mb), very quick, and very light on system resources. It doesn't even need installing - you just save the executable somewhere and associate PDF files with it. It's far more pleasant to use than Acrobat Reader, opening in a fraction of the time and handling much better.
ScanR is a case in point. A very good idea (aren't they all?!), it offers the service of converting digital images (from digital cameras and camera phones) into PDF documents. The service has been running and under promotion for some months, and the quality of the output is very good (documents look like a flat-bed scan of a good photocopy of the original). It would be very useful in my drive to ditch paper.
There's just one slight flaw. You can scan a multi-page documents by taking a picture of each page in turn and sending them as attachments on the same e-mail. The flaw? Pages are returned out-of-order, requiring the use of software such as the free PDFill PDF Tools PDF editor to re-order the pages. This bug is "known", and will be fixed, but no timescale for the fix is available.
This seriously hampers the service as it stands.
It's also far from clear which way round you should scan documents - A4 needs to be scanned in landscape, so in order to make sure your scans come back the right way up, should you have the top of the document on the left or the right of the frame? As it turns out, it's camera dependent, so you need to use trial-and-error to find which is the right orieentation for you. However, once you've found it, it should stay the same for your camera.
ScanR has the - here's that word again - potential to be a very valuable service, but right now it's pretty crippled, and rather more worthy of alpha status than its current beta tag. The team behind the service really should have fixed show-stopper bugs like the page ordering before releasing and promoting ScanR.
Oh and, while talking about PDFs, let me recommend the free Foxit PDF reader. It's very small (<1Mb), very quick, and very light on system resources. It doesn't even need installing - you just save the executable somewhere and associate PDF files with it. It's far more pleasant to use than Acrobat Reader, opening in a fraction of the time and handling much better.
