Category: Technology

Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 sucks in Firefox 2 features

From the release notes:

Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 is a heavily-updated version of the only native Mac OS X browser using Mozilla.org’s Gecko HTML rendering engine. Notable improvements include enhanced tabbed browsing (“single window mode”), integration with the Mac OS X spell-checking system, detection of RSS/Atom feeds, an improved design for the “blocked pop-up” notification, enhanced options for cookies and downloads, and a resizable search field in the toolbar. This release also includes enhancements in speed, security, and rendering accuracy brought by version 1.8.1 of the Gecko rendering engine.

Note that Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 is in the “alpha” stage, which means it is still under active development. We feel that it is usable on a day-to-day basis and is a large improvement over Camino 1.0, but you may still experience bugs and some functionality may not work entirely as intended. The goal of this early release is to demonstrate the team’s progress and to allow users to report problems early in the development cycle.

Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 shares the same code base as Firefox 2.0, both being based on version 1.8.1 of Gecko, and thus shares many of the security fixes and Gecko improvements that are in that version of Firefox.

Finally we’ll see real session saving, better tab behavior, feed detection and integration with Keychain for password saving. This is in addition to the integration that Camino already supports for the Apple Address Book.

There’s still no support for Firefox Add-ons and it’s unlikely that we’ll see any in the future, but the Camino 1.1 release, built on top of Firefox 2, is starting to shape up nicely.

Mac Mash Pit/CocoaDevHouse tomorrow at Obvious Corp

Mash Pit logoJust in case you’re still in town and your fingers are itchin’ to push some pixels or get some code out, tomorrow there’ll be a Mac Mash Pit at Obvious Corp’s offices in South Park from noon till late afternoon. If you’ve got an hour or two to spare, it’ll be a great chance to meet the folks behind ODEO and Twitter and to get a little hacking done.

Rumor has it that Larry from Ma.gnolia will also be there as well as R. Tyler Ballance from the infamous Bleep Software and Blake Burris, the host, from CocoaRadio.

What’s a Mash Pit? Well, historically they’ve been day long events getting together multi-disciplinary and talented folks to work on projects that focus on problems described in human terms, like, how can you make it easier for folks to send contact info to each other. And so on. Recently, Mash Pits have become more theme-driven, with a number of OpenID Mash Pits popping up. So, it only seemed appropriate that while MacWorld was going on to bring the event to Mac developers and designers.

Hope to see you there tomorrow!

Sticking eyeballs with toothpicks; or Yahoo buys MyBlogLog

Another sign that Yahoo thinks it can buy its way to the hearts and eyeballs of the netigentsia comes today, as Yahoo buys stalkerati tool MyBlogLog. We already knew that this was coming, but we’ve finally confirmed it.

Ok, so that’s all good and well — I’m impressed at how quickly this thing grew and then got snarfed up (in fact, I was checking out its impressive traffic today) — but what concerns me is that this kind of purchase underscores my thesis about Google’s Identity Mousetrap, but this time in the Yahoo neighborhood. Interestingly, in conversations with my Yahoo friends, they’ll said that their BBAuth system should have been reconsidered given the advances of OpenID… and yet, “Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.” (emphasis mine)

Ok, well, that’s business.

But, the language Horowitz continues to use also seems to threaten Technorati: This closes the loop between readers and publishers, he said. Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It’s the power of implicit networking.

Which, if you’re a blogger and watch your Technorati stats, you can see that there are interesting parallels here.

Rafer continues: The biggest thing in blog search is ego search – my name, the web sites I love, says Rafer, who will work for Horowitz, promoting his service to Yahoo’s many properties. People search Google and Wikipedia for information; with blogs, people look for cool things and serendipity.

So what’s curious (that I don’t have much insight on) is what this means for Technorati, who now supports OpenID, both as a provider and consumer, and Yahoo, who seems interested in the 33,000 MyBlogLog users and getting them to switch to Yahoo logins, but who doesn’t yet have its own blog search to cater to that audience. I mean, it makes sense, it’s just a bit… odd. Is it really worth $10M?

MacWorld events and Citizen Central

A bunch of upcoming events this week during MacWorld… many at Citizen Space, our coworking space. As usual, you can add these events to your calendar by clicking here.

Bonus next month:

Oh, and don’t forget to use Twitter to catalog your exploits by prepending your messages with macworld! Let’s annoy Buzz!

Dodgeball mobile site on the way

dodgeball mobile (logged out)
After suggesting that Dodgeball had become braindead, signs of life, like the forthcoming Dodgeball Mobile, are making me reconsider.

Dodgeball Logged in

One thing that I would prefer to see, though, is their use of the “m dot” convention, rather than the longer-than-necessary “www.dodgeball.com/mobile” URL.

I sent them this feedback and got an automated reply:

Thanks for writing to dodgeball. This is just an automated reply to let you know that we received your email. We’re putting most of our energy on
improving dodgeball right now, so we’re unable to provide personal
responses to all the email we receive. We do look over all feedback and
suggestions, so we can bring you the best dodgeball experience possible.

So, at least they’re “putting most of [their] energy on improving dodgeball”. We’ll see, but frankly I’m becoming more and more of a fan of Plazes SMS.

ZDNet calls 2007 the year of URL-based identity

In its 2007 predictions, Identity World suggests that URL-based identities will take the alpha geek world by storm. I couldn’t agree more:

URL-based identity begins a cycle of real adoption in the blogosphere and alpha geek communities.

URL-based identity overcame many technical and interoperability hurdles in 2006, and got key buy-in from developing communities. 2007 will see the early incarnations of this technology begin a cycle of significant and real adoption in the blogosphere and alpha geek worlds.

I’ve started collecting resources on OpenID over on Ma.gnolia and imagine that in a year’s time, these sources will tell the story of how OpenID, like Firefox, rose from the shadows of former monolithic and proprietary endeavors to become the preferred and predominant open source, decentralized solution for representing oneself on the web. Truly there’s much work to be done and that’s what makes it so existing and worthwhile — it’s young enough and simple enough to still reflect the needs of the individuals whom it serves.

I’ll be writing about this more soon I hope, but I think Identity World has done a group job with their predictions. Now if only ZDNet would follow the advice of their own sages!