Flock

I'm posting this entry from within Flock, a new browser based on Mozilla, the codebase which underlies Firefox. You might think the world needs a new browser like it needs a hole in the head, and I more or less agree with you, but Flock has some really cool features:

• You can link your bookmarks to your del.icio.us account so that they're always available when you move between computers.

• It integrates with a number of blogging services and software to let you blog directly from the browser. You can even highlight a chunk of text on the page, right-click on it and select "Blog This", and it opens up a blog post window with the text inserted and quoted, and the site name linked. (I'm finding that its blogging editor is incredibly annoying when you're trying to do bulleted lists)
  

• flickr integration, which seems to me to be a bit gratuitous, but it is kind of cool to get access to your photos in a toolbar (sorry, "topbar").
  

• Integrated RSS feed reader, which right now has a really clunky interface. But this is just a developer preview release, so I'm sure that will improve.
  

• "The Shelf"...kind of a clipboard for web content. You can drag-and-drop links, chunks of text, or pictures on to it and later drag-and-drop them into your blog posts (it seems to be made pretty specifically for blogging; you can't double-click on items in your Shelf to open them up, and although you can drop them onto any application that accepts clipboard data, what you get is an HTML-wrapped version of your content).
  

All in all, very impressive. I hope that some of these features (especially the social bookmarking integration) make their way over to Firefox, but I'll be keeping an eye on Flock's progress.

The Future of Video

Apple just released a new video-capable iPod, as was expected. You can also download music videos from the iTunes Music Store, at $1.99 a shot. That's cool. Yawn.

But wait...what's really interesting is that you can also download episodes from some TV shows, like Lost or Desperate Housewives--also for $1.99. This is the start of a major paradigm shift. I'm not a huge TV watcher, but there are a few good shows out there that we've gotten hooked on (Lost, Smallville, Arrested Development, Battlestar Galactica). Not having cable and Tivo, though, I can't always catch my shows. I've always said I'd be happy to pay a small fee ($1.99 is about right) to be able to download an episode legally (it's not hard to find and download them "illegally" online). Now I can do that. Go Apple. The networks certainly weren't going to get their shit together to do it themselves.

It's still got a long way to go. Only a few shows are apparently available. Actually, I don't know exactly what's available because the only links to videos on their "Music" store home page are for "Music Videos" and a big "Lost" graphic. Is it so hard to just have a separate video section in your store? I'm guessing that Apple tried to push this out the door quickly, before properly redesigning their store interface to support the videos. Or maybe not. It's not that hard to do. Regardless, I'm sure they'll sort it out soon enough.

They're going to have to rename the Music Store, though. Media Store? Actually, my guess is that once they pad out their offerings a bit, they'll have a separate Video Store.

An Apple Video Store will be huge for everyone involved. The networks will be able to squeeze new money out of shows that have long since been written off. You'll be able to relive your youth by downloading some Miami Vice episodes or "owning" your own copy (as much as Apple's DRM lets you own) of the classic "Master of my Domain" Seinfeld episode, not to mention getting access to all kinds of old shows that will never make it to DVD. And of course Apple get its cut.

Go Apple.

Shot of the Week

Link Roundup

In lieu of anything else interesting to post, I'll clear out some of the links I've been saving:

Writeboard
I haven't had the opportunity to really use this yet, but it looks like a pretty cool collaboration tool. No more sending Word docs back and forth. It's also packaged with their equally cool Backpack app.

Aurgasm
I'm a bit late in the game here, but I've just started discovering the wonderful world of MP3 blogs. All sorts of great, eclectic music, for free. There are more MP3 blogs out there than you can shake your booty at, but this is one of my favorites.

Improving Link Display for Print
Absolutely ingenious. Using CSS & Javascript, you can automatically list all links on the print version of your web page as footnotes. I'm going to have to give it a shot on this site.

Fog Creek Copilot
For anyone who is, like I am, the person family and friends turn to when they have computer problems, this looks like a godsend for those trickier issues. Yes, computer remote control software is nothing new, but the really ingenious thing here is how easy it is to get someone set up. You just sign up with the site and give the person you're helping a code. They go to the site, enter the code, download the necessary software, and you're connected.

CSS Layouts: I Give Up

We're in the middle of a fairly major site redesign at Triporama, and I was doing my best to have the layout be as purely CSS as possible, replacing the previous table-heavy layout. It's turned out to be a major headache, and I'm taking a step back now and reimplementing parts of the layout with tables.

One problem with CSS today is that every different browser has different levels of support for the different versions of CSS, whereas tables have been around for so long that most browsers in use today handle them fairly similarly. The really big problem with CSS, though, is IE. Internet Explorer is a CSS bug fest. It would be great to say "fuck IE," (actually, I say that almost every day) but it is unfortunately still the most widely used browser.

Yes, I know--tables aren't meant to be used for layout; they're not "semantic", they're slower (not sure about that one--maybe if you have many levels of nested tables). And yes, clever designers have come up with all sorts of tricks to get CSS layouts to work across different browsers. But you end up spending hours or days getting your layout to work on various browsers and what you have in the end is a confusing morass of fragile code. It's just not worth it. I'll wait for IE 7 plus a few years (although my parents will probably still be using AOL 8.0 on a dialup line) before attempting a pure-CSS site again.

So, to summarize my new web design philosophy: use CSS for various individual elements/components on the site, but if you're doing a multi-column layout, use a table for the main layout (actually, I still have my header and footer positioned with CSS, as I spent far too long figuring out how to get the footer to stay glued to the bottom of the page if you have less than a page worth of content, but to flow after the main content if you have more...and the solution I found seems to work on all modern browsers). The layout for the whole site is in a single file, so making site-wide changes (another argument for using CSS) is still easy.

Slowlight

Spotlight was a great addition to OS X, and it works great for finding things buried in your filesystem. But for anyone used to Quicksilver or LaunchBar, it is painfully slow as an application launcher, which is really all I need most of the time. I recently reinstalled Quicksilver and I don't think I've touched Spotlight since then.

Link Roundup

Some random interesting stories/links I've run across in the last week or so:

Photos from this year's Burning Man in the form of a graphic novel. Very nicely done.

With an audio recording of you typing away at your computer for 10 minutes, it's possible to figure out everything you typed. (via Crypto-Gram)

Tongue-eating bug found in fish. So gross, but so cool. (via Boing-Boing)

Word Pads, a very addictive word game. My high score so far is only around 5000 18575.

I didn't really discover this in the last week, but it's too cool not to get a mention: the Gmaps Pedometer (the link centers on a more interesting location than the default of Hoboken, NJ). It's a testament to the brilliance of the Google folks that people have been able to come up with great hacks like this.

Finally, I'm going to try to play in the upcoming Ultimate Frisbee regionals, despite not having played since last winter, mostly due to my crappy back. I think I can hold it together for a weekend. Or at least a day. But this has inspired me: a 67-year old man comes out of retirement to play for his soccer team in their time of need. (via Fark)