Category: Technology

Journler 2.5 is out and worth a look

Journler 2.5

Last year during MacWorld, a Mac developer by the name of Philip Dow came to stay with us after he found us on Can I Crash. It was a rather happenstance occasion, one not lacking in a certain serendipity given that I’d just discovered his application — a nice little gem called Journler.

Well, it’s just about a year later and Phil’s come out with a new version — that is blazingly fast and does everything the previous version did but better.

On top of being a really exciting release, Phil has also developed his own license — one that will hopefully support his work as an independent Mac software developer. The terms are pretty simple: if you use Journler for personal use, pay whatever you’re able; if you use it in a more professional or shared context, you’re obligated to pay $24.95. Phil explains:

The basic idea behind changes to the license is fairness. There’s none of that thirty days nonsense, annoying reminders, superimposed warnings or greyed out menus. You are not a child. Simultaneously, if you are capable of purchasing the program or donating, do so. With these changes I’m working hard to stay true to my original intentions as the creator of Journler while also ensuring that I can continue working on the program under the conditions I am now.

I really respect this approach to development and charging, though I know it’s a harder path to take. In any event, if you’re looking for a journal, note-taking, GTD, media-collecting, personal-snap-shot-taking, podcasting or blogging tool (yes, it really does all those things), do give Journler a look.

Highrise follows trend with OpenID signups at 9%

Opening door to OpenIDIn announcing a number of welcome changes to their pricing plans on Highrise, their new CRM tool, 37 Signals also provides some welcome figures on the uptake of OpenID:

Another interesting stat is that 9% of the people signed up are using OpenID. Lots of early adopters on board!

This is more or less consistent with Ma.gnolia’s rate of uptake:

So far, over 15% of new Ma.gnolia members are seeing the advantage and getting their OpenID when they join Ma.gnolia. Considering how new OpenID is, and that it takes a bit of un-learning of old sign-in habits, we’re really delighted to see this adoption rate.

Jason Fried has also suggested that OpenID will be making its way to their other products soon:

We’re still learning about OpenID and OpenID implementations with Highrise. There are still some bugs to work out. Once we feel we’ve really nailed that we’ll look into spreading it across the rest of the product line.

As we see more mainstream coverage, like the USA Today article suggesting that OpenID “cuts down on Web registrations”, it’s likely that we’ll easily surpass 100 million OpenIDs by the end of the year as more and more small businesses reap the benefits of the advance of this technology in how it reduces the greatest barrier to attracting and retaining new customers: signing up for yet another account!

All in all, good news for OpenID and for 37 Signals customers.

ClaimID adds social networking

claimID.com XFN creator

In spite of previous disavowals of having social networking aspirations, identity link aggregator ClaimID has now added the ability to add other ClaimID members to your profile as contacts.

Interestingly, they restrict you to adding friends who have OpenIDs (since every ClaimID profile URL is an OpenID) and use the to define your relationship.

This is a significant decision because, presumably, every OpenID has an owner. As such, adding one of these “verified” OpenID URLs as a contact to your verified OpenID URL could represent a higher trust level — a stronger “claim” as the lingo goes — than simply using the XFN rel-me attribute to create a “weak” relationship claim. Or so goes the theory.

Meanwhile, I’ve recently been reordering my Flickr screenshot collections and have created a set devoted to adding friends interfaces. If you have examples of similar interfaces, leave me a link to the source and I’ll get them added!

37 Signals’ new app Highrise launches

Login to Highrise with OpenID

With narry a word on the 37 Signals’ blog SvN, the veil has been lifted on their long awaited CRM tool called Highrise.

There are a number of posts that capture some of the many features of Highrise on the SvN blog and are worth a look:

In the meantime, I’ve collected a bunch of screenshots (nice catch Allen) — in addition to their great tour — that will give you a sense of what the app is all about.

I’m totally excited about their adoption of OpenID, but I have to admit, their implementation — especially in the forum — is a little odd. I love the auto-adapting interface for inputing your OpenID, but the fact that I can’t sign in to the forum with the OpenID that I created my Highrise account with kind of misses the point.

And still no sign of microformats either, but a guy can hope right?

Anyway, it is exciting to take a look at all the interface greatness in this app — definitely some fine work. Whether I’ll become a paying customer is up in the air, especially as open source solutions like CiviCRM exist (though without the interface trappings that make 37 Signals products so attractive). I do like what I see so far, though — and if I can find a way to fit it into my workflow, I’ll likely end up a pretty satisfied user.

Apollo Alpha is out, the WOW comes later

TechMeme in 3DWeb

There’s a ton of buzz being tossed on the alpha release of Adobe’s new . And reasonably so, as ZDNet blogger Ryan Stewart points out, in a world of Web 2.0 internet-goodness, this is the desktop rearing its head again in the form powerful RIAs.

I’ll leave the coverage to other folks, but in the meantime, I installed the runtime libraries and ran the sample apps included — grabbing a bunch of screenshots along the way that you should take a look at.

I also set up a Flickr group for other screenshots and a Ma.gnolia group for collecting news and other Apollo-related links.

I’m particularly excited about Apollo given its advance of the state of web tech… and the best is yet to come (though Finetune gives a taste of where we’re starting from). At the same time, I’d prefer a slightly lest costly and more open — but equally intuitive and capable — solution. OpenLaszlo, where y’at?

i use this adds support for OpenID

iusethis openid association

I’ve give credit to Tara for provoking this one.

i use this, one of my favorite Mac OS X software sites, has enabled OpenID consumption using miyagawa’s OpenID plugin for Catalyst.

Note: I hadn’t realized, but despite its Rails-like trappings, i use this is actually a Perl app powered by Catalyst. One issue that was revealed in using the Catalyst library concerned Yadis discovery of delegated OpenIDs. Until I hear from Marcus, you’ll either need to use your direct OpenID URLs or the traditional meta-tag method of delegation until support for Yadis is baked into the library.

Alex King releases Twitter Tools beta for WordPress

Alex King has released a WordPress plugin that links your WordPress blog to your Twitter account, allowing you to pull your “tweets” into your blog or post directly to Twitter from WordPress. Among other features is a sidebar widget for latest tweets and a forthcoming digest mode.

read more | digg story

IconBuffet and Shopify add support for OpenID

Shopify » Please Log In

Two more announcements for OpenID adoption — but this time on the consuming side (as opposed to my originally incorrect report about WordPress.com — for now, they’re only serving as an identity provider).

The first is Shopify, a great Rails-based custom store application. As Alex points out, these guys really get it right — and make it super easy to create compelling marketplaces. And now, it’s super easy to log in with OpenID.

IconBuffet | Login

Meanwhile, IconBuffet has gone through a major overhaul, becoming something of a social network for … icon enthusiasts! (Sweet!) One of the more existing aspects of the relaunch (at least for me) is their use of OpenID: you can either create a new account with an existing OpenID (say, your WordPress.com blog URL) or you associate your existing account with an OpenID. Either way, they too’ve made it really easy to get going with OpenID.

I imagine that these won’t be the last of the increasing deployments of OpenID in the medium- to long-tail (read: not Google or IBM, but small business community). What’s so existing about these recent additions is their proximity to commerce — and how folks like Shopify could eventually weave a web service that allows you to check out — entirely by way of logging in to your OpenID provider. If you choose a good OpenID provider, you can start to see how the CardSpace metaphor makes sense — just like when you go out to eat and depending on whether it’s a business meal or a personal expense, you’ll use a different credit card to pay.

The same thing is true for OpenID — where you can have as many OpenIDs as you like and you can pick among them for different uses or purposes. It’s only a matter of time before I go to check out at IconBuffet, I login with my WordPress.com OpenID and I’m able to use credits that I’ve purchased on WordPress.com to pay for my icons — with no need to reach for the credit card, to fill in my address info or any of that ever again!

Now, if that doesn’t sound exciting, you might want to check your pulse. 😉