Category: Tools

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…

I remeber well Brent Simmons’ proposal of a“Law of CMS URLs”: The more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URLs. Today I had the chance to work as editor with the WebDB portal platform from Oracle 10g Application Server. It is pretty modular, but it is a pain in the a** to really get to…

Eastgate released Version 2.4.0 of their fabulous Tinderbox tool. A number of enhancments – most of them very interestig to advanced users. There has been quite some time since the first announcement of a Windows version of Tinderbox. I am sure the release is not too far ahead in future. Keep an eye on the…

This could be a very useful helper for the frequent HTML coder: an implementation of the HTML Tidy Library as MacOS X Service: this allows to clean up HTML code in any application.

I am doing almost all of my presentations with Keynote – and was waiting for Keynote 2 to show up. Actually I am not missing any feature in this application, but I am looking forward to the Flash export and I wonder if it will be easy to do voice-overs for self-running presentations. What I…

More blogging sidecar tools arrive: Userplane’s Audio & Video Blogger service is an easy-to-use system allowing the creation of audio and video recorded messages for use in blogs, websites and email.The Userplane AV Recorder application will automatically detect your camera and microphone, and allow you to record up to a 10 minute recording. Each recording…

Napster was not only hot because of the easy sharing of MP3 files – but also because of finding interesting music in libraries of people with similar taste. Now that Napster is dead the P2P-netowkrs have taken over – but they don’t really offer something that comes close to Napster. So what other ideas people…

There is a little iPhoto Plug-In that allows direct export to Flickr. It works as export filter and is used to upload images (but not manage uploaded images). So the best image collection management application meets the best online image sharing application. Bravo!

Adam Curry and Dave Winer started a series of two-head radio talk show called “Trading Secrets“. You can download the first show (60 MB). They talk about politics and some IT stuff. The show is basically like a long phone call. Dave calls via Skype from USA with his Windows laptop while Adamy Curry records…