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There’s no reason why the of future of travel sites can’t include a service like CanICrash.org. I mean, they’re in the business of travel, right? Maybe I *don’t* want to stay at hotels but with people I know (or who know me). Ignoring the obvious naivete quotient on this concept, why can’t I, when I book a flight, also send out an email to my remote friends and create an instant blog post announcing my travel plans and need for housing?

Speaking of, Tara and I are looking for digs in North Carolina this weekend and Boston the week of August 4. 🙂

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.

The future of my desktop

BumpTop desktop

So I have to follow up on my post about the future of browsers, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t show off one incredible possibility, pointed out by my buddy downunder, Cris Pearson that got a boost at a recent DemoCamp.

Go check out the video to get a sense of what it’s all about or download a hi-res version (.MOV (117MB), .WMV (98MB)) to see it in high def.

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I want the ultimate away message. I want to communicate my presence (or lack thereof) selectively, openly, or to whomever, across multiple media and networks, from wherever, whenever, to accelerate serendipity and study my own being-around habits. Crossing up twttr, dodgeball, plazes, AOLIM, skype, blackberry is logically and practically only the beginning.

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Realizing that there a lot of folks who post awesome screenshots on Flickr end up NIPSA‘d… wouldn’t it make sense for someone to create a Flickr of Screenshots? I mean, hell, use Flickr as the backend and just aggregate semi-interesting uploads with the screenshot tag.

I mean, there’s a lot of potential use for this kind of thing — from software developers to designers to companies trying to get feedback and interface ideas. Anyone, anyone?

Quicksilver’s new Cube interface

Quicksilver Cube UI

It’s not quite as revolutionary as the Constellation interface, but the new Cube interface in Quicksilver once again demonstrates the beauty and diversity of Nicholas‘ design talents.

I’m admittedly late reporting this, but I only discovered how to activate the preferences for this neat little hack… I also had to get the latest Dev build to even get the Cube plugin (install) to load, so it’s not surprising that I didn’t get around to it until now.

At the very least, worth a look.

CSS3 Columns loves me some Gutenberg 2.0

Multicolumn layouts in CSS3 -- Source: pathf.com

Apparently some work has been going on implementing columns as a CSS3 module. Trouble is, the approach is more related to newspapers and magazines of yesteryear than with the way the web works. How useful will this kind of thing be for my Blackberry? For highly interactive sites?

Sorry, admit it: tables are still the best structure for web layouts even if using them is a semantic bastardization. And until there’s a standard that emerges that is better, simpler and more semantic than tables, you’ll still find people arguing for their use in layouts.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ll never use tables for layout and can’t remember the last time I did, but the CSS3 draft seems so painfully out of touch with the realities of interface development for which tables are most often used (since when do you see an interface widget “flow” from Column A to Column B??) that this module seems focused on Tofu-style reading rather than making any real progress in the development of a richer interface layout language.