Entries from October 2005 ↓

The flock broswer has to have one of the best built in blogging tools that I have seen. Here is a couple of features that I found to be extremly useful.

Integration with Flickr

If you want to add a picture from Flickr, all you need to do is click the topbar button and above the editor will appear a filmstrip of the user you entered in the username textbox.  For example I entered in a name of someone I found one flicker that had Flock images.

Support for most of the popular web blog hosting software

I use Wordpress and Blogger and its worked perfectly with both.  I have been able to connect to either service and have my blogs posted with no problems.  I love the fact that I can select which account I have and be able to blog to that service.

Built in Blog This feature

When your reading a website and come across something you may find interesting to add to your site, you hightlight the text, right click and select “Blog this” from the popup menu!  It then creates a new blog entry, with the text and a hyperlink to the webpage you are referencing.  I love this feature.

Here is a screen shot of the Flock favorites Manager (via Flickr) Notice how its integrates with del.icio.us via the del.icio.us API. Maybe Microsoft will include a feature like this in IE 7 since they have about 360 days or so before it gets released with Vista. OK enough IE bashing. However, I really do hope Microsoft is paying attention. These are features that all the browsers should have.

Well today my brother Adam called me about getting new drivers for his new ATI card. I went to the ATI web site today and I noticed that they have released Drivers for Windows Vista! Damn! I just unistalled Vista because of the lack of driver support. Oh well. I guess when the next major build of Vista is released on MSDN, I will reinstall it knowing that I can get drivers for it!

In case you have not heard of this new browser called Flock, I highly suggest that you take a look at it.  It’s an open source project that is using the same code base as Firefox.  (They have not forked the project, so many of these features could be added later to Firefox.  Time will tell if they will be able to do so).  So far I’m pretty impressed with it.

It’s part of the new Web 2.0 movement.  They are taking browsing to  the next level.  Gone are bookmarks!  Instead the bookmarks are stored online at del.icio.us.  What’s good about this service is that all your bookmarks are online and you can access them from other computers.  To me this is a huge feature because I am constantly switching between my mac and windows computer.  When I am at a client’s site with my Windows notebook, I could really use some of my bookmarks that have been stored on my mac.  This new feature makes it possible.  Another cool feature of del.icio.us is that you can share your bookmarks with others.  del.icio.us works also with firefox, safari, opera and I believe IE.

Some of the other features include a built in blogging editor, (using it right now to post this blog), an advanced integrated RSS reader and several other new features I have yet to try out.

One of the other things I noticed right away about it is that it looks cleaner than Firefox.  (my complaint about most open source projects)

Take a look and let me know what you all think!

After using Vista for about 3 weeks I came to the conclusion that I could not continue to have it as my primary Windows computer. It’s far too buggy for day to day usage. Sure it’s in beta but I don’t recall XP beta being this bad.

The biggest problem is that anything that uses Direct X was giving me headaches. The lack of proper drivers for my graphics card played a huge factor.

There were several other bugs that were also annoying. The one cool feature of rendering the application window as a thumbnail as you hovered over the taskbar would quickly get confused on what window it owned and should render. Yes that’s a small thing but it bugged the hell out of me!

IE 7 kept crashing on me. It still has a long way to go when it comes to properly handling sites designed using the latest CSS 2.0 standards.

The fact that I could not get my RAID controller to work should have stopped me right there from installing it.

When the next beta comes out, I will probably try it again. Until then, it’s XP for now.