Category: Things I think about

Neat Mac apps that help you concentrate

Todos

I’ve found a couple apps recently that help you focus by removing your desktop clutter using various techniques. I’ve used Backdrop forever (and also for my screenshots) but there are some newcomers.

One is $15 Zazen, which sits in the menubar and helps you to “concentrate” on the foremost app by dimming the others. Doodim does pretty much the same thing, albeit less elegantly but for free.

WriteRoom offers “distraction free writing” and comes pretty close — closing off all other distractions and situating you in a black room where you can write Matrix letters to yourself. The autosave and autosession-restore really do make this one feel well thought out and don’t forget to participate in their user-powered software development methodology.

In the neat category is Italian-born Afloat — similar to Doodim in a sense, but in reverse. Rather than dimming everything else, Afloat lets you dim the current foremost window or set it to always be on top. Looks like the developer is looking for localization help, so if you’re game, drop him a note.

Finally, if you’re looking to take a power nap when your fingers are tired and your head ist kaput, check out the pricey (but worth it) Pzizz. They’ve added iPod integration lately, but the idea is simple: create an audio track to accompany you on your naps. Sounds fluffy but it’s not. I downloaded the demo, tried their 20 minute power-nap and literally was out for 20 solid minutes — resuscitated when the announcer dude mystically awoke me from me sleep. It was actually a little freaky. But it worked.

Oh, and the image for this post really has nothing to do with concentrating, but it was a great distraction earlier this week. Using the application Todos, I took a screenshot of my apps, uploaded it and something like 6 hours later there were already 200+ notes on the thing. How’s that for community collaboration? Anyway, I created a group for folks to do the same thing and to share the apps they use.

I’m sure there are more and I’ve barely begun to fill out my I Use This profile, so let me know — which ones do you use that I missed? Linux/Windows folks? Got suggestions?

SoylentGreenSpace v3 launches

Technorati Redesigns

My buddy Dave Sifry over at Technorati has launched v3 of Technorati, commemorating their three years as a company and as the interweb’s reigning whuffie tracker. However, the changes as I see them so far seem to represent a shift away from the Matrix-green-loving blog divas and digerati that have made Technorati their shrine towards a wider, and perchance less discerning, audience:

While we love expert bloggers, we’ve also spent a lot of time making Technorati understandable to normal people.

As long as normal doesn’t mean “mediocre” or “average” I guess I can see a need for this change — but my feeling already is that the new design is too Friendster-cum-MySpace than the good ol’ Technorati greenback of yore. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been anticipating this redesign for some time — my concern though is: did they identify their audience correctly? …or am I feeling a bit snubbed because I’m not part of a presumably profitable demographic (profitable for advertisers that is)?

To be more positive (since I’m trying to make an effort lately!): the things that I am excited about in this milestone are taking place either behind the scenes or will only show value over time. For example, getting more accurate link counts and stats (which lately have varied between Technorati Mobile and the main site)… Consider the expanded popular page (whose URL should really be renamed to /popular)… or take a look at your personal page — certainly a lot more cluttered and riddled with things of little use to me personally, but at the same time showing the promise for someday becoming my electrocardiograph on the web. Oh, and the Favorites feature is an interesting not-too-del.icio.us-like addition that unfortunately doesn’t do anything better than NetNewsWire, Flock, Bloglines or others already do (popups?!) — so why not just integrate with those and offer me a remote view of feeds in context? (Especially since NetNewsWire syncs with NewsGator and has an open API that would make this process fairly trivial).

But Dave et al — here’s my plea and my challenge to you: in your efforts to grow your business and maintain your position as top of mind for what’s going on in the blogosphere, don’t forsake those who have championed you for so long in exchange for what looks like an opportunity to go massive. The long tail is chunky and has a richness that Technorati can help us all make sense of. In that way, Technorati should endeavor to become (hold your groans) the Flickr of Blogs — in the truest sense. When I come to Technorati, I don’t want only what’s popular, I want what’s good. And sure, “good” is in the eye of the beholder but frankly, if you take my earlier suggestion, then you’ve already got the data that you need to help me understand just what is good and relevant to me, rather than a broad swath of what’s out there and being linked to.

So Dave, think about it this way: when I come to Technorati as a blogger and as a registered user, I want Technorati to reorient and rebuild itself around me at the center. And I’ll tell you, every other blogger feels the same way. For the longest time, this is what Technorati offered to the world. Forgive us for being self-absorbed and echoic, but blogging works when you know who’s talking about and to you, so that you can respond — and as our ears to the ground, you offer an essential piece of the conversation toolset. Essentially, you provided me an inbox for my blog and for my second ego. I hope that, in orienting towards “normal people”, you don’t end up diminish what it is that puts the rati in Technorati.

SuperHappyDevHouse 0xB this weekend

0xB promo

It’s the first DevHouse after DHX, so it should be a good one. I’ll be in North Carolina at BarCamp, so I won’t get to check out the new location, but I’m sure it’ll be oodles of geeky fun regardless — especially with the addition of construction gizmos like Legos, K’nex, Rokenbok. PT better make an appearance. 😉

Songbird on the Mac

Songbird on the Mac

They teased us at first, but it does seem that iTunes “inspired” music player Songbird is now available for the Mac as a nightly build (read: use at your own peril).

Built on the same guts as Flock, I’m eager to see what comes of this, though it really seems like Pandora is doing more to revolutionize music listening thus far (don’t miss Airfoil + PandoraMan for the best wireless listening experience).

Oh, and with other apps that add intelligence to your listening habits and enhance your playlists (see Last.fm, MusicIP, beaTunes and Soundflavor) the landscape in music consumption habits is surely going to change drastically in the next year. I’d love more than anything for Songbird to take a lead in that respect, but to do that, I think it needs to focus on the experience of listening to music, period; it needs to define what the Songbird listening experience is, and be able to answer clearly and concisely why anyone should care. It’s not just that it has a browser built in or that you can buy from 8,000 different music providers. I don’t care about any of that — I do care, however, about how good the music coming out of my speakers is and how much the tool I’m using to play that music has to do with it. The future’s not in featureware, it’s in experience.

When Flickr goes down, God kills a kitten

Flickr 9000

In case you didn’t notice (yeah, I’ll admit that there might actually be people in the world who didn’t flinch), Flickr went down for a considerable amount of time today (something about moving 20TB of photos).

Well, Flickr’s back up again (thank G*d, I was starting to fade holding my breath so long).

And I gotta tell ya, the genius of Flickr is that, during their downtime, they put out a colouring contest. A friggin’ colouring contest. I mean, some people shy away behind geekery and tomfoolery to explain away the inevitable. Flickr? Nawh. It’s like a snow day where the busses never come — stay home fools! A make snow angels!

So I made two entries.

Oh, and I think I also found housing for this weekend, so thanks! But Boston, well, I’m still looking!

Flock 0.7.3 lands

Flock 0.7.3

Simple maintenance release with the following changes:

  • Photo

    • Photobucket sub-album and Flickr set browsing and uploading. Allow users to refine photos displayed in photobar by album.
    • Several bug fixes for photobucket and flock integration
  • Extensions

    • Allow extensions that haven’t been modified for flock to be installed. Users will be warned that the extension has not been tested with flock but will be allowed to proceed. Note that this feature has been partially available since 0.7.1. If you have installed unmodified extensions you will see a warning, “This update will cause some of your extensions and/or themes to stop working until they are updated.”, during the upgrade which can be ignored.
  • Spread flock feature. Allow flock users to opt into adding a flock tagline to photos dragged from the photobar or the from the desktop into a text area
  • Setup (First Run) experience enhancements

    • Bug fixes, better discovery of current configuration and UI treatments
    • Added option to allow anonymous statistics to be gathered during initial setup. This will allow Flock to further streamline and simplify the setup experience.
  • Other

    • Added OPML export to My News
    • Blog Editor fix for editing text in source view window
    • Updated to use new deli.cio.us API

I’m still waiting on atomic saves in the blog editor before I use it (still composing directly in WordPress with Camino) and I’d love to see a full-screen slideshow mode in the Flickr Photo Topbar, but the product continues to improve. Go get it.