Technology – Page 18

Synergy for iTunes will add Audioscrobbler support

Based on a bug I submitted nearly a year ago, Wincent is finally adding support for Audioscrobbler reporting, one of the primary features that was attracting me to rival iTunes controller Menuet.

As a great mood indicator and part of my micro-presence attention stream, my Last.fm listening stream gives quite a bit of insight into where my head’s at. Not having to run a separate app to send this information to last is certainly a nice addition to an already indispensable tool.

Pieces of me: disintegrating online micro-presence

…Just came upon Jaiku, the latest in micro-presence aggregation apps, thanks to ex-roommate Andy Smith, who’s now working with them — in one of his first gigs post Flock.

They recently went through a redesign and I have to admit, it looks pretty good.

It makes you wonder though, just because you can pull in the pieces of your multi-faceted identity into one place, should you? (With more variants of this idea popping up regularly, there’s clearly a trend here.)

I mean, in theory, horizontal integration may lead to a fuller picture of you, but the reality is that folks might only be interested in certain verticals of your life, and not the whole kaboodle.

And even when I was sketching out Rhyzomatic to solve my own problem of decentralized identity, my thinking was along the lines of bringing together links to the original sources, and letting people choose which pieces interest them most. Admittedly, I’ve merged in a few Flickr updates here and there with daily Ma.gnolia updates, but that’s as far as I’ve gone (even then I asked permission and some folks derided my choice — though I can’t find the post now).

So I’ve got Twitter, I’ve got Plazes, I’ve got my blog (more than one), Flickr, YouTube, and on and on. I should be better about maintaining it, but I’ve got ClaimID pointing to these and other sources as well. Along comes Jaiku and allows me to bring these things all together into one river, and well, I like it, but without the original context, how does it represent me? This may be a case where the sum is not greater than the parts — and that, for online identities to work, you have to allow people to break off the pieces of people that actually interest them most.

This is curious to me, and perhaps to other side of single sign-on and unified identity. Maybe you like my screenshots but find my blog boring. Should I force you to consume all of it just because I think it’s interesting? Somehow that flies contrary to the best aspects (pun intended) of this, the modern web.

The solar-powered gadget-recharging nomad bag

I got an email from Andreas today letting me know that Sakku has been released and is now shipping to the US.

The Sakku is interesting because, unlike most other messenger/laptop bags on the market, it serves an excellent utilitarian purpose by charging your iPod, cellphone or digital camera while you’re out in the sun. The sakku akku features an integrated recharcheable battery for those foggy San Francisco days.

Besides that, Sakku also has a focus on general sustainability, first, relying on solar power, and second, using recycled sails from sail boats for the bag material.

From a design perspective, my biggest concern is size, as it appears much larger than the Timbuk2 bags I’ve had and now use. The FAQ is pretty comprehensive, though, and you can check out more photos in the Sakku Flickr group. Oh, and unfortunately, according to the FAQ, the solar cells don’t produce enough power to charge laptops. Bummer.

Though I probably won’t be ordering one just yet, if you’re interested, they have an online form for ordering. At 230€ for the akku and 180€ for the direct, it’s a bit out of my price range, but I can see how this technology could be extremely useful for hikers, bikers and other travelers who need power and can’t rely on their accommodations for juice.

As is the trend lately, I’ll disclose that I wasn’t paid to write this, won’t receive any compensation and have commercial interest in this product. It’s just interesting, uses solar power, and is worth letting people know about it to make up their own minds.

What dreams are made of: Pzizz 2.0 is out

As you might know, I’m a fan of Edward Laing’s Pzizz nap app.

Well, he’s finally launched version 2.0, offering new features, ways of customizing the soundtrack ending experience and a much improved interface, but apparently the launch process hasn’t gone perfectly.

Still, a hearty congrats to Edward and team — I’m eagerly looking forward continued improvements.

Gang warfare, Web 2.0 style

Summary: Adobe + Mozilla + Google are ganging up to take down Microsoft to become the definitive future web platform.

I’ve been reading with great interest and intrigue about Adobe’s substantial contribution to Firefox’s codebase in the form of open sourcing Flash Player 9’s virtual machine.

On the one hand, I’m tempted to go and congratulate Adobe for their good will and desire to support “sustaining innovations“.

On the other, more cynical, hand, I know enough to read between the lines and see this for what it really is: business as usual, with the good grace of open source being used as a context for making this appear “nicer” than it really is.

But don’t get me wrong — this is a good thing for the web, for web denizens, for web developers, open source and for innovation. So that’s not what I’d like to point out here.

Instead, I’d like to offer a theory that this is a calculated move by at least Adobe (if not Mozilla and Google collectively) to go at Microsoft’s jugular just when it’s starting to regain its some of momentum as the dominant web platform after releasing IE7. (Note that my intimations are purely conjectural and not based on known fact. Whether intentional or not, this announcement spells out an alternative future, and it’s worth teasing out what it might look like, even as the story is developing.)

So let’s state some baseline assumptions and assertions:

Adobe PDF is Adobe’s crown jewel. Their virtual monopoly on this rich format provides them a huge amount of business through their Acrobat product (now in version 8) — and they’ve moved to protect it before.
Adobe Flash Players are installed in well over 90% of client browsers, making it the most widely deployed browser plugin anywhere (note the tie-in to Flash video — and who’s the biggest consumer here? YouTube much?)
JavaScript and ActionScript (Flash’s programming language) are very close cousins — pushing EMCAScript and ActionScript closer through a faster virtual machine inches Flash ever-closer to subsuming the browser.
Apollo offers to wed the best of Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax and PDF — hell, you can even build a browser with this stuff

Contrary to Liz Gannes’ take, I think Adobe might, somehow, be positioning itself very wisely to help shape the future of online publishing, data interchange and rich web experiences. In fact, by nuzzling up to Mozilla and offering more and more open betas (though still with obnoxiously unruly EULAs), Adobe is starting to have the sheen of an open source player.

So let’s think about this: Microsoft is set to release Vista soon — and just as the delineation between web and desktop is finally evaporating — Adobe and Mozilla strike out with a bold partnership that firmly implants Adobe’s engineering technologies into the core equation between browser and desktop. And, given the large number of XHTML and Flash gurus in the wild, this seems like the death nell for XAML before the shrink wrap has even been removed. This isn’t about Flash becoming the web OS; this is about Adobe protecting and promoting it own delivery platforms and formats as it tag teams with Google to suck the “Live” out of Microsoft before it even has a chance to counter.

Adobe wants to be front and center in every browser; it’s smart enough to recognize however, that, like Google, the core threat to their position in the market is Microsoft’s Live platform technologies. An Adobe browser couldn’t dent Microsoft’s platform share, but two open source browsers can by creating the de facto web publishing environment and tools for the future of the web-centric desktop.

An interesting development indeed.

Introducing the GoogleBerry

Let everyone else build the frames and the platforms… it’ll be Google Content thru and thru.

In fact now you can grab all four of Google’s mobile services, including:

Search
Maps
Gmail
Google News

… in one fell swoop (load on your mobile device, direct download).

This bundle includes the Gmail client that Google recently released, though with a set of four alternative icons. The set will also notify you when new versions are available.

Admittedly, these are some very useful and pretty well-designed applications for BlackBerry mobile users. The question is — where’s the competition?

iTunes 7.0.2 fixes VolumeLogic compatibility

Sweet!! Today’s iTunes update restores compatibility with VolumeLogic, my most favoritest audio enhancer!

Sadly iTunes 7 broke the plugin and Plantronics has been working on a beta since then, but it looks like it’ll be no longer necessary!

Tip: If you want to get it to work without skipping, make sure that you disable iTunes’ Sound Enhancer (you won’t need it anyway) in the Playback preferences.

Jimbo Wales has left the building?

Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t it kind of significant that Jimmy Wales, one of the main drivers behind Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikia, has stepped down as chair of the Wikimedia Foundation? Or is this just normal board reorganization within a non-profit? According to Jimmy, he’s too busy. Okay, I could probably buy that.

Apple embraces microformats in new .Mac webmail

If you’ve been playing with the new .Mac webmail application, something under the surface very significant is present, but you’d probably never realize it. In fact, if it weren’t good works like Jon Hicks’ expose-mf.css browser stylesheet (view the above image without the stylesheet), you’d probably have no idea that beneath the surface, Apple was quietly giving a nod to an upstart open source community.

Given the source code that I’ve been provided, I can confirm that Apple has indeed added support for hCard in .Mac webmail, though not without a few errors (notably the ‘n’ optmization).

The significance of this can certainly be understated at this point, as few applications are built to take advantage of microformats browser-side (adding address cards that are already in your address book to your address book doesn’t make much sense) however, with Greasemonkey and other ideas like GreaseKits making the rounds (okay, so I came up with GreaseKits), we can count this as yet another feather in our cap as more and more large vendors make their web properties more semantically rich, opening up possibilities previously inaccessible given the sheer cost of maintaining one-off scrAPI techniques.

Now when you write a script to parse, augment, enhance or “user-interface-ize” microformatted content, it will work everywhere that microformats show up — not just one site at a time. With Firefox 3 looking to add support for microformats, it’s positive support by folks like Apple that will provide fertile ground for what the next generation of mashable web services looks like.

Inquisitor 3.0 goes free

David Watanabe’s Inquisitor for Safari has gone three… and free.

Would still like to see this for Camino (as Flock has this functionality inspired by David’s work), but David says he’s overcommitted and there’s simply not enough uptake of that browser compared with Safari. (Bah!)