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GooGa 1.0 – A Multi-Google Search Gadget

Tiger might be a year away, but here’s a new “Gadget” for Dashboard I’ll be looking forward to playing with when does…Main feature? Searches Google, Google Images, Google Groups, Google News, Froogle, and even gmail.

Having a decent HTML and CSS background, and some antiquated recollection of Javascript, I decided to code what is the obligatory gadget, a Google search gadget named “GooGa”. The API is not difficult, and only working between the holes in my Javascript memory and some poor debugging info in Tiger. [Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog]

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Palm Apps List

Here’s a great list of applications for Palm users, Treo or no Treo.

In my quest to prove just how wonderful and powerful the Treo 600 is, here is a list of the software that I’ve added to it (not the utilities that came with it). The latest additions have an asterisk next to the name. [The Shifted Librarian]

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Quick Notes from the WWDC Keynote

Automator Rocks!

Just watched the WWDC Keynote and was thinking about how amazing the tech is within Automator… I can’t wait to get my hands on it and begin simplifying the computing for me and my family… No more how do you do this? No more doing things again and again. Inter-op between apps for some digital workflow seems like just a few clicks…

As a somewhat frustrated reverse engineer… I don’t have the skills needed to do much of what I’d love to do without really sweating it out. Automator looks like it will just open the door to possibilities beyond what I thought was possible.

iChat AV conferencing is amazing!!

I love how the windows are almost liquid in their appearance — spanning to allow changes in the group conversation. Great quote from Steve on video conferencing — How are we going to do this user interface? Are we going to do it with three separate windows which is how everyone else would? No…

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Apple RSS Demo!

Here’s a video from Apple showing off RSS in Safari 2.0. It looks very sophisticated yet simple. There are some nice features, like the scrolling bar to adjust the length of each piece and a quick way to jump through the dates of your saved items. Search is also looks to be quite strong. The snapback feature seems to lets you jump back and forth from browsing to feed reading…

I think a lot of people are going to finally get RSS when this hits next year… too bad Tiger is so far away!

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Safari, RSS, NetNewsWire

In addition to the Gorgeous Aluminum displays announced at WWDC, Apple is also showing off the new Safari 2.0 which includes a built-in RSS Reader…

What I like about this announcement is that it popularizes syndication. Despite its fast growth, there’s still a huge education job to do. The average Mac user doesn’t know about the technology yet, but putting it in Safari means they will know about it, and it gives the technology a kind of validation, an Apple seal of approval, for the people who are slower to look at new technologies.

It also may mean that Apple will evangelize RSS to publications that haven’t yet adopted it. Which is great: it’s not something we have much time for, and when CNN hears from Apple it carries a bit more weight than when they hear from Ranchero Software. [inessential.com]

From what little I’ve seen here — far far away from WWDC — it seems that Safari can render RSS instead of downloading or displaying an XML file which is what tends to happen. This is great for many people who have not yet figured out what RSS is, and what they need to deal with the link. BTW – Feedburner URls get the browser friendly treatment automatically…

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g-mailto and g-mailit

Some nice bookmarklets over at sippey.com to let you initiate clean new GMail messages as well as messages which include a subject and url based on what page you are currently browsing.

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Amazing But True

This is actually quite sad. I wonder it it’s just an oversight or if all MS Reader content gets this protection regardless of what it is.

I don’t know whether it is a MS policy, but I’ve downloaded a good number of free Palm Reader e-Books that were free from protection because they were either promotionally free or within the public domain.

In this case, our Constitution is not only not free to download, but you are not free to read it how you like.

The madness continues. From Larry Lessig: At Amazon.com, you can purchase an electronic version of the Constitution, fitted very nicely to a Microsoft Reader (not Mac compatible), and protected quite completely with DRM. The description says you%u2019re not permitted to print it. [JD’s New Media Musings]

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Quick Feedburner Follow-up…

I just saw that Steve Rubel switched to Feedburner after reading about my experience and I realized I had not mentioned what I had done in making the switch to retain existing subscribers while picking up new ones through the new feed URI. Here’s the skinny from what I did earlier in the week so anyone else interested can take advantage of the same tricks… It was actually quite simple.

I found a few posts on the Feedburner blog which made it all possible.

The great thing about Feedburner from a user perspective is that it’s simple. You the reader no longer have to make a syndication selection (Atom vs. Flavor of RSS) and I the publisher can make universal changes from the control panel which automatically go into effect. There is no editing of code, period.

Following the info on the two links above, I was able to change all my autodiscovery links (they are in your HTML header) to all point to the same Feedburner URl. I then used a simple redirect in my .htaccess and was off. Within 24 hours I had and continue to have some nice stats to complement the sitemeter web access info I check regularly.

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Mark/Space Mac Hotsync

Just in from Palminfocenter…

Mark/Space has announced version 4.0 of The Missing Sync for Palm OS. Expected to ship in August, this version supersedes PalmSource’s aging HotSync Manager for Mac OS X. [PalmInfocenter]

“When we set out to revitalize Mac-to-Palm synchronization, it was our intention to provide users with three things,” said Brian Hall, Mark/Space CEO, “Compatibility with existing software conduits, cool new features like Wi-Fi synchronization and confidence that a dedicated company with many years of Mac and Palm OS expertise is supporting their needs. We’ve succeeded in providing a solution that will ensure the future of Mac-to-Palm synchronization.”

Too bad this will cost $$… You are looking at $39.95 for an electronic copy, but will likely be discounted when you purchase a new device.

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Feedburner with traffic — whoa!

Feedburner is very cool – imagine all the information you don’t have about your subscription usage and well…Voila! Sure it could be better, but wow I love the detail you get!

24 hours since I implemented and I am seeing click-throughs, what’s being read and how people are reading my stuff…

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iDive

I received an email, a Press Release actually, for iDive and after checking it out on the website, I have to say it looks very cool. You can catalogue your digital video and still content, get a poster frame view of what you have within each video recording, tag things by people or places and even move frames and pictures over to iPhoto for still capture. Of course you can also use it for pulling feeds into Final Cut or iMovie. Here’s a clip from the release…

MONTPELLIER, FRANCE – 21 JUNE 2004 : A new Mac OS X application just released is set to redefine the standards in managing digital video (DV) clips. This new product called iDive™ offers semi-professional users a robust on-screen digital video shoebox to store clips and still images. The application includes truly innovative tools that make navigation both easy and fast, regardless of the number of clips being stored. Power previewing, customizable views, “drag & drop” attribute tagging and a timeline display turn any assortment of disorganised tapes into an instantly accessible library of digital video that can be enjoyed at any time. Designed to sit alongside DV editing applications, iDive promises to eliminate the frustration and time-wasting in locating and viewing clips hidden amongst hours of footage, by simplifying visualisation, tagging, storage, organisation and retrieval of digital video clips and photos. Information and download from aquafadas.com Price: 49.95

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gCount

gCount is a menubar item that will display the number of unread messages in the inbox of your Gmail account… makes webmail more useful! [MacMegaSite]

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iTunesWatcher

I just stumbled across iTunesWatcher 2.5 which is an applescript based app that posts active tracks from iTunes automatically to your site… There are definitely other apps or ways to do this (like Kung Tunes), but I think this one is the most sophisticated yet simple to configure. I’ve set up a page to track my listening… will probably work in more into the flow of my site when I get more of a chance.

My only glitch so far is that my music is based off of a different machine than the one I am on, and the applescript does not seem to like that too much for now. I copied the library file from the other computer to my laptop and am connected to the remote drive storing my tunes to stream and that works.

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MooseCandy 1.2.0

I just deployed this … made it quite easy to add some Google Ad Banners per post as well as every X posts on my main and category pages.

MooseCandy is a little plugin to help you stick content into your WordPress layout, just before a post. You can read more about it above and read the comments in the code for usage instructions. [Weblog Tools Collection]

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Feed switch…

Made some changes to my template today and believe it’s all good. Basically I am redirecting my old WP generated feed to one being managed by Feedburner so I can get some stats on who’s reading and what’s being read.

Please let me know if you notice something funky.

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Gmail Loader

TheGmail Loader will Import Your Mbox or Maildir Files into GMail. Caters to Windows users, but there is a Linux Version with Python Source code available as well. Hopefully that means that there will be an OS X version soon…