Category: software

Adding a free ‘blogs I read’ search box to your own weblog provides your readers with an easy way to use Google to search the web, your site or just the blogs you read. [Search Engine Watch]

An excellent tip and something I just added to the sidebar. You can now search the web, the blogs I read or just this site…

Adobe Systems announced Monday new versions of Photoshop and other key publishing and graphics products, but some of the biggest changes won’t be in the applications.

The software maker’s new product combines Photoshop, the InDesign page layout application and the Illustrator graphics application into the Adobe Creative Suite, a package that includes integrated tools intended to help make it easier to move work from one application or person to another. Chief among the new tools is Version Cue, a basic content management tool intended to improve the way workers share files for collaboration and review. [Adobe overhaul brings tools together | CNET News.com]

Stand Alone software today announced the release of Handheld Headlines/RSS, a dedicated news and RSS reader for the Palm OS of devices. [PalmInfocenter]

I just downloaded and installed and it reflects the usual and expected high quality of Stand Alone Palm apps. Seems to be very well thought out – minus one critical oversight… import for your subscriptions! You have to enter them manually which is not as bad as you might think since the default set is pretty good, but far from what you might really want.

Now that this is here, Ranchero and Stand Alone need to get together on a sync function – not just for subscription files, but for what has been read! That would be fantastic!!

It’s time for applications to start running off of remote configuration files. By this, I mean have applications store their settings in a file they access via an HTTP call, instead of on the local file system. [Gadgetopia]

This would be fantastic across a few apps – RSS Aggregators (subscriptions and what’s been read or updated), mail programs (junk filtering and rules) and the browser (cookies, passwords and bookmarks).

Divmod Quotient brings together your email, IM/IRC and IP telephony. Having not tried it yet, it looks a little like Zoe. [Hack the Planet]

Looks like a very cool project that will allow for Bayesian spam filtering, indexing of mail including IMAP, as well as safe (no image loading) mail. I love projects like this and today use Zoe which indexes my mail, but does not include Spam filtering. For that I’ve been messing with SpamSieve when I am in Mail.app and Moz’s built in when I read from within the browser.

Right now it is still a bit too early for me on this one, but something to follow certainly.

Mozilla 1.5 RC1 is the latest version of the alternative Web browser for Mac OS X. Version 1.5 adds improvements to Mozilla Composer, support for logging in Chatzilla, improvements to tabbed browsing, and improved unstyled XML display. [MacNN News]

I’ve been hooked on Mozilla for a month or two now and can’t see going back to Safari until it gets a significant update. I’m too hooked on the sidebar and the integration of Mail (the client is excellent with great junk filtering) but there are still a few kinks I’d like to see worked out either in Mozilla or Firebird. Nothing I see as a showstopper, and only one that continues to actually bother me continously (though not enough to switch back):

Open links from external apps in new tabs instead of windows – not sure why you can’t do it, but at least I know it’s like that on all platforms, not just Mac. Safari has this as an option in the prefs and Moz needs to get on this. It’s a pain to have multiple windows going after you’ve adjusted to tabbed browsing.

Mozilla has a much more robust password management system than Safari and can actually maintain multiple passwords and logins for the same page which is very helpful in the work environment when you are switching between views as either you or your client.

I don’t understand though why the form auto-fill feature is not able to be added as either a button on the toolbar or a keyboard shortcut. It stores a plethora of information if you choose and can would be even more helpful if it were more accessible.

Overall, Mozilla is an excellent browser. There are only a few instances when I have to use something else and unfortunately it’s IE.

Hertz does not let you rent a car successfully without IE since the page does not work unless you are in that old piece of crap. Too bad they don’t mention it when you arrive.

Lotus Notes forces IE as well since it only successfully opens links in IE (not even Safari). Usually I cut and paste, but click here link-types don’t paste since you can’t capture the location.

I highly recommend Mozilla and would encourage anyone to put it to the test. It hold’s it’s own against any option proving in many cases to be superior.

While the infamous blue screen of death may haunt many desktop computer users, the banking industry and security experts dismiss the fear that someone will break into Windows-powered ATMs to empty bank accounts. For one, the ATMs will use a stripped-down version of Windows NT that is quite different from the software on desktop computers.

“What Microsoft actually sells to the banks for ATM use is a cut-down version of Windows that doesn’t contain things like Web servers,” said Ross Anderson, a researcher in Cambridge, England, and author of Security Engineering. “They have tried to cut out the unnecessary rubbish that clutters up the typical PC. How good a job they’ve done, I just don’t know…. So we definitely can’t rule out the possibility that someone in the future writes a Slammer-style worm that causes thousands of ATMs to start spewing out cash.” [Wired News]

DataViz announced today that Documents To Go Premium Edition version 6 is now available. Documents To Go now offers native file support for Microsoft Word and Excel documents and a number of other new features. [PalmInfocenter]

Excellent news – this is my preferred way to Office on Palm.

Slides for the

Seybold Session [Sam Ruby]

I’d love to hear the accompanying commentary…

…something that has always been on my todo list has been setting up encrypted mail. I use OS X’s Mail application so I went a googling and found a great howto on setting up gnupg with Mail with a plugin for Mail named GPGMail. [O’Reilly MacDevCenter.com]

Cool to do… though of course like a walkie-talkie is not so much fun when you only have one. Finding other people who a) want to and b) are able to communicate securely is not that simple beyond basic “can you hear me now” BS.

Those of us who have Palm OS 5 based handhelds can’t run the cool PalmWiki hack that enables WikiWikiWords to be linked from any text field of any running app, because old-school Palm hacks aren’t supported on OS 5.

But we can run HyperNote, which is a standalone application that’s basically a wiki-fied version of Memo Pad.

It’s GPL code too, so it’s free as in beer, and free as in you get to fix bugs yourself. 😉

[~stevenf]

over 30 minutes ago I started to sync my Palm with my computer… still going.

Is it possible to produce a wiki that offers all the power of a wiki while at the same time looking like a regular website? [A Whole Lotta Nothing]

Apparently it is… pretty cool stuff. A wiki (under the right circumstances) might actually be easier to use for a personal or small corporate site than a blog system like moveable type, which has also been discussed as a way to manage a site beyond the blog.