Category: Tools

This tool is used to enable some kind of visual programming with apple script components Metafy’s Anthracite Web Mining Desktop toolkit gives you the tools you need to build powerful data processing systems with an easy-to-use visual interface that makes complex manipulations quickly possible. Anthracite is built for people who need to transform internet sources…

There is a new Blog Editor called Performancing available as Firefox Extension. Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browse and lets you post to your blog easiy. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as…

I was discussing to implement some web projects based on either Zope or the Twisted framework. The latest version of Zope 3 now replaces the internal ZServer with the Twisted framework. Maybe this distinction becomes more or less obsolete: The ZServer has been replaced with the Twisted server. The Twisted server supports all that the…

I am eager to test Flock. Someone posted some screenshots on Flickr.com. As far as I know it is based on Firefox and it is going to work with del.icio.us for Bookmarks and flickr.com for images. It will also a sepcial interface for bloggers where creating blog posts is a matter of drag & drop…

I had a chance to briefly check out these collaborative editors based on AJAX: writely.com, backpackit.com & writeboard.com, jotspotlive.com. It is pretty amazing what developers are trying to achieve now. Backpackit is aimed to be some kind of simple groupware. Writely.com and Jotspot Live are aimed at collaborative writing. I personally found the visual feedback…

I had a brief look at study.log. It is a personal information manager (developed with Macromedia Director). It is generally a very interesting concept. But the implementation has issues: there are show stopper bugs, it is very slow you can’t drag & drop objects from the OS layer into the application. Director possibly is not…

I came across the TiddlyWiki tool. It is some kind of interactive Wiki opening pages with animation once you clicked a link. It is basically just a very clever JavaScript enhanced HTML-page containing the whole Wiki. You save the page (after allowing the script to do so), upload it to a server and you’re done.…

Plone 2.1 was released. There are many new features. Mostly they are brushing the application. Some days ago I created a skin for Plone. It took quite some time to digg the vast CSS styles. There is also some cleanup necessary for that, but generally it is as easy and flexible as it could be…

I had a look at the try-out version of Adobe GoLive CS 2 – and it didn’t even get much of a chance from my behalf. It is ridiculously slow. It needs 10 seconds to switch from a layout view of a HTML document to the source view (on my 1.33 Ghz G4 PowerBook). The…

ThinkSecret.com is spreading the roumor that Apple might introduce a new iChat version with sharing. It is the #1 request I have for iChat: it would allow possible to give remote presentations. Yes, there are other applications that had this feature for years (like NetMeeting), but iChat was the only application that actually worked for…

We have Google Maps, MSN Virtual Earth – now we get Amazon Maps. The fancy feature of the day at Amazon are Block View Images: you can walk the streets of a number of major US cities…

Wikipedia Animate aggregates all changes of a wikipedia page and shows an animation of it. It uses Greasemonkey (which allows some kind of client side web application created with JavaScript).

It wasn’t even a question of time when this was going to happen: Subscription TV (see http://participatoryculture.org/). DTV uses the Bittorrent technology to distribute the files. Very clever. So this leaves one question: How to find content? There is this built in channel guide that seems to be similar to the podcast support in iTunes…

The popular german TV news program Tagesschau started podcasts MP3 of their prime time broadcast. This supports my hypothesis, that podcasting will be adopted quickly by traditional media. I still think podcasting will remain marginal in the blogsphere.

Dave Winer has released his latest project: OPML Editor. I like writing in outlines, but OPML Editor remains a typical Winerish tool: powerful for users that want to dig a scripting tool on steroids – but utterly useless for “normal” users that expect a tool without dead ends and a somewhat standard compliant graphical user…

Microsoft’s answer to Google Maps is Virtual Earth. Obviously Microsoft uses other data for their maps. Alltogether Google Maps appear to be nicer, faster, a little more precise and with better aerial imagery. Microsoft sometimes uses BW images – maybe from the infrared spectrum. Microsofts product also sometimes fails to load all tiles of the…