Ocell.Blog v2

Fraser Speirs, the man behind Xjournal and the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto, has a page describing Appcasting. I’m not sure how long this concept has been out, the first time I heard about it was today when I saw it on the front page of Ranchero Software today.

Appcasting is a pretty simple idea, but I think it would be great to see it widely adopted. Fraser describes it as a way to deliver application updates through RSS feeds. It works on the same basis as Podcasting, where the url for an audio file is embedded within a RSS feed. When a news aggregator comes across one of these embedded urls, it automatically downloads the audio file to a location specified by the user, who can then listen to the file or load it up on a portable music player.

Appcasting would work the exact same way, except instead of delivering audio files, the feed would deliver binaries of software updates and add-ons. For example, Fraser Speirs offers an Appcast for his FlickrExport iPhoto plugin. Whenever he releases an update, he also posts it to his feed. Anyone who is subscribed to his Appcast will automatically get the update when their aggregator refreshes the feed. Then all that’s needed is for the user to install the package that’s already been downloaded. For anyone with a broadband connection, it looks like an excellent way to make sure their software is up to date without having to check a developer’s site on regular intervals. Of course, this isn’t needed by many apps that have built in update checking, but looks like a great way to deliver the same kind of service for applications without a call-home ability.

Read More About Appcasting Here

Trillian was updated to v3.1on Thursday. I have been away from my Windows machine since then, so I didn’t find out until tonight. 3.1 adds quite a few major features in my opinion. One major addition is UPnP support for routers. This means that if you are behind a router that supports UPnP (Universal Plug n’ Play), file transfers should have a much higher success rate now. Failed file transfers have always been a common frustration with Trillian, but should finally be resolved. Trillian 3.1 also brings some coding enhancements that have increased speed while decreasing the size of the application, an impressive feat indeed. Also, now when you type URLs or emoticons, they show up formatted in your text box before you send it out. This means a URL turns into a link, and turns into a little yellow face (or whatever may be your current emoticon set) in your text box before you send the message. Many users will also rejoice when they find that Trillian finally supports HTML in profiles, something that has been a long time coming.

One of the most important changes for me personally is how contact lists between multiple accounts are now handled. In the past, when you logged into AIM with more than one AIM account, the buddy lists of the accounts were merged. This means if Sue was a contact for AIM account #1, and Joe was a contact for AIM account #2, both Sue and Joe became contacts for both AIM accounts. This wasn’t a major deal in the beginning, but after a couple of years I found it nearly impossible to remove people from my buddy list because as soon as I logged in with an old AIM account anyone I had deleted was added back to my current list! Somewhere along the line Trillian added the ability to create identities, which allowed you to keep multiple buddy lists separate, but this caused the length of your buddy list to increase along with the number of identities you set, and each contact was listed multiple times.

In Trillian 3.1 when you log on with more than one account all of your contacts show up in your list together, but they are not merged. When you sign one account off the contacts that belong to its list sign off along with it. This seems like the perfect solution for me so far, and I’m interested to see how it works out in the long run.

I also feel like the preferences menus have changed quite a bit, and for the better, but these changes are difficult to quantify. If you are a current Trillian user be sure to get this update, as it promises to fix a lot of issues which may be bugging you. If you aren’t a current Trillian user and are still using something like AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, or ICQ, I recommend you head over to www.trillian.cc right away and download a copy of Trillian Basic 3.1. Of course, this only applies to Windows users, and OSX users will have to look to Adium for a the most Trillian-like IM solution.

There’s a post up at the Google Blog saying that the Maps team has been reading through blogs on the internet to find out what people think about the new Google Maps service. One request they’ve already implemented is support for the Safari and Opera browsers. I don’t see this as an added feature as much as a requirement for any modern web-service, but I’m looking forward to what user ideas they add in the near future.

I feel like I’m behind the times here, but tonight I looked at what del.icio.us is for the first time. del.icio.us is a site that promotes the concept of having “social bookmarks”. You sign up for an account, and add a couple of bookmarks to your browser. When you want to bookmark a page for easily retrieval later, you hit the del.icio.us bookmark for “post to del.icio.us”. This brings up a page with the url and title of the page you were on already filled out, and you can add a description and tags for the page, then you hit submit. The page and its info is then added to your personal collection of bookmarks in your del.icio.us account. Basically, the idea is that instead of storing bookmarks on your computer in your browser’s settings, you store your bookmarks on the del.icio.us website. Organization is handled by tags; one word descriptions that let you form categories for your bookmarks, and each bookmark can occupy more than one category or “tag”. Anyone who has used Flickr or Picasa will understand this concept instantly. I like this idea for my personal use because I am constantly using two computers every day, my Windows desktop and my Powerbook. I have played with some Firefox extensions that will sync bookmarks between two computers, but I really prefer to use Safari on my Powerbook. del.icio.us promises to provide me with a great solution, as I can have one bookmark to my del.icio.us account page on each machine, and have identical bookmarks accessible from either machine. Even though this doesn’t seem to be an aim of del.icio.us, it certainly fills the need.

So that’s the individual side of things. Now for the social aspect of things… When you add a bookmark, with it’s description and tags, to your own personal database, it also gets shared with anyone else using del.icio.us. When you look at your bookmarks you can see exactly how many other people have the same webpage saved. Clicking on this number shows a list of these people, and all of the descriptions and tags they’ve attributed to the page. You can also search through the entire del.icio.us database using tags or a word search. When your search results come back you not only get personalized commends on the pages that result, but you can also see how popular they are. This particular blog is currently saved by two people (myself and mesh) while Flickr is saved by over 1,400 people. It’s (painfully) obvious which site is more popular. I see this as an excellent tool for finding new websites that may pertain to your current interest.

The only thing I’m unclear on at this point is whether there is a way to keep your personal bookmarks from being viewable by everyone. I imagine making private bookmarks would really work against the whole concept of “social bookmarks”, and if you really don’t want someone to see what you look at everyday, you’d be better off saving the bookmark to your software instead of the server.

Engadget is linking to a story at Computing.co.uk that talks about PalmSource’s future direction for the PalmOS being cell phones. PalmSource will make it’s PIM applications availible for inclusion on basic phones that don’t run PalmOS. The applications will need to be modified to run on non-touchscreen devices. I imagine the move is an attempt to develop PalmOS PIM as the standard format for mobile devices. Also, Palm will drop its HotSync protocol and move to the open-source SyncML protocol. On the surface, this looks to be a great move, as this should allow PalmOS devices to sync with anything that someone wants to write the appropriate software for. Perhaps this will be the start of some greater standardization for devices syncronizing data.

Full Story

(I just had to include that picture when I found it on Google… for some reason I really get a kick out of it. Brings back the old days.)