Things I think about – Page 34

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I bet you could recast the whole Greeks vs Romans civilization clash as something very nearly resembling today’s Windows vs Mac relationship. There seems to be the Trojan horse (when Gates invested in Apple) and now, with OSX essentially cannibalizing Windows applications, we’re seeing the story come full circle (I certainly don’t see the visually superior Mac apps running on the PC anytime soon). Fascinating to see history repeating itself yet again.

WordPress makes a move towards hAtom, gets upgrades

I missed WordCamp this weekend (owing to the fact that I was presenting at Wikimania) but there seems to have been some good announcements that came out of the event.

For one thing, the hosted WordPress service added a few features, one of which is a $15 premier service that lets you edit your CSS. Blogger offers this service for free, but heck, WordPress is still independent and needs to have a way to bring in some dough — and as this is a highly desirable feature, will probably lead to income for the Automattic folks at least a fraction of what Cyworld is pulling in with all their custom digital paraphernalia and trinkets.

So but that’s not all… no, Andy Skelton announced (from what I hear) the availability of a new skeleton theme called Sandbox that is designed for themers. If you’re on WordPress.com you can go enable it now, as I have (it’s totally basic, so I imagine that you’ll see a lot of styles start to appear for it) or download it to put on your own blog.

I’ll actually be doing this once I return to San Francisco.

Why?

Simple: Sandbox is the first known theme to support hAtom.

Why does this matter?

The same reason why hResume matters. And then some. It’s because it not only puts more of the power of publishing into the author’s hands, but it also removes the need to RSS or ATOM.

Let me say that again: because the Sandbox theme is marked up with hAtom in its HTML, there’s no need to supply an alternative link to RSS or ATOM because the page itself is able to be read by newsreaders.

Or, will be. In the meantime, we can use Chris Casciano‘s script for NetNewWire to allow client-side subscribing or server-side transforms to convert any page into a subscribable document.

The potential here is immense — if Matt’s able to move the entirety of the WordPress.com theme base over to hAtom, we’d have quite the playground for an HTML-based syndication format, removing the overhead of generating RSS or ATOM feeds. Instead, you’d subscribe to a website and its content, not some anti-DRY format.

Update: Bill Humphries has released a version of Kubrick that supports hAtom.

Hex color grabbers

Cris Pearson just pinged me about the aptly named Hex Color Picker. This one might actually replace my former color picker of choice, iPick. You might also consider exColor, a super-simple and small tool to quickly grab hex colors with the magnifying glass.

New release of Monolingual

There’s a new release of Monolingual out that fixes the bug I submitted where removing certain architectures would kill apps that checksum their executables to prevent tampering. Monolingual now blacklists such applications a Speed Download and FontExplorer X.

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…don’t look now, but sooner or later you’ll be able to run Windows applications right from within your Intel Mac’s OS. At one point, this wasn’t exactly obvious. Fortunately, the independent market can respond faster than the stalwarts. Whether they’ll be cannibalized later on remains to be seen.

Email isn’t dead

With cultureware services like Flavorpill launching a new email newsletter called Activate (“World News Once a Week” — subscribe) and Amit Gupta and co‘s PhotoJojo pulling in over 10K subscribers (4K via RSS) and getting Wall Street Journal ink, email newsletters are far from dead.

Just put that one away in your quiver next time some tries to suggest that email’s dead (I’ll have more on this later).

More widgets to mow

Don’t look now, but we’ve got more widgets for ya… I tell ya, the damn things are multiplying like gnats, buzzin’ around the interweb and cloggin’ up the tubes. Anyway, you can now add WidgetBox and Mooglets (built on the excellent moo.fx preview) to your DashboardGadgetWidgetabulator.

Google launches Mac Picasa Web Albums Uploader

It’s simple, it’s sweet, it does the trick and is pretty fast. It’s the Picasa Web Albums Uploader for Mac, announced today on Google’s corp blog. You can see it in action (not unironically) in this Flickr Set.

Chris Casciano’s microformats hacks

In case you haven’t been watching, Chris Casciano has been pushing in some potential…ful directions lately (“potent” just seems wrong in this context) with microformats. First he releases a script to extract microformats in NetNewsWire then he creates a tool for subscribing to hAtom feeds (which basically allow you to subscribe to an properly marked up HTML document instead of nasty-looking RSS).

On top of that, he pushing the envelope for microformats support in Camino. Not too shabby.

Keep track of this stuff in my Microformats Ma.gnolia group.

Hacking Google proxies on your BlackBerry

You may or may not realize this, but when you use Gmail on your BlackBerry, they’re doing some tricky things behind the scenes to “improve” your “Gmobile” experience.

For one thing, when you’re reading your Gmail, they strip down the service to its barest essentials: AJAX, tables, selecting… all gone. But unsurprisingly, it remains quite useful (that whole simplicity thing).

Anyway, I discovered an interesting hack along with some serious privacy … concerns … while tooling around with Gmail.

The privacy issue is pretty simple: everything that you visit from Gmail (and this is more or less true whether you’re on Gmail Mobile or the regular version) is tracked by Google. Click on a link in an email from your friend in Gmail? Google knows. One might argue that this is how they improve their service and add relevance to the AdWords that they show you (they already grep your emails to contextualize the ads in the sidebar, so watching the links you click improves the personalized search results you get). Ok, that’s the tradeoff I’m willing to bare in order to receive their free services; I’m not complaining necessarily, just pointing it out because they don’t make it explicit that they track the links that you click.

Now, on to that hack.

I was looking to make dinner reservations last night on the OpenTable website. Tragically they don’t have a mobile-friendly version (still using tables for layout?? gross!) so the experience was… let’s just say, pretty terrible.

But then I remembered! — ah ha! — Google tracks all my surfing habits with their Gmail proxy — but they also reformat all the sites that I visit to be more mobile friendly… So I opened up the Send Address dialog in the BlackBerry browser and sent it off to my Gmail account (which I’ve set up as “me” in my address book).

I opened up my Gmail inbox in the BlackBerry browser and sure enough, visiting the link that I just sent myself took me through the Google proxy to a page that looked like this:

…instead of this.

Sweet! So now whenever you find yourself on a site that’s completely unusable on your mobile device, just prefix the url with this http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u= and you’ll have a much more usable interface, thanks to Google’s spying proxies!

Bonus: WordPress plugin Bad Behavior will block attempts by proxies like Google’s from being able to access your site. I’ve got it installed and you can see how many Spambots have attempted to access my site in the few days that I’ve had it running!