Ministry of Intrigue

It is with some trepidation that I set out to review the developer preview of the Flock browser. It hardly seems fair, does it? After all, the public beta isn’t scheduled to come out for another month. What kind of jerk reviews software that hasn’t even been released yet?

This jerk, apparently.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Flock is a new open source browser (currently only available as a developer preview) based off of the Mozilla code base, particularly code from Firefox. In fact, with an online converter utility, most Firefox extensions will work on this browser, although there are also quite a few that just will not work due to the fundamental differences between the two programs.

Flock aims to be the Web 2.0 browser, and as such comes with full integration with social web services like Flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us and Shadows (social bookmarking). It also has Technorati support and a blogging tool that interfaces with Blogger, Typepad or Wordpress blogs. The browser itself resembles a pleasingly themed Firefox, with the the aforementioned tools nicely integrated into the interface. There is a lot to cover here, so I might as well break it down into categories.

Photo Sharing

Flock has Flickr support built right into it, which you access at any time via the topbar. With the photo uploader you can drag and drop files from your computer into the browser, and tag it as you choose before uploading.

You can also use the topbar to search through your photos or others, either by tag search or user name. I actually don’t do much photo-sharing and only reason I created a Flickr account was to test this feature out. I don’t take many photos and don’t spend much time looking at them. Leading me to your Flickr stream is a sure way to bore me to tears. However, this type of service has become insanely popular, and I think that this feature will be a big draw among those users.

Social Bookmarks

Flock supports both del.icio.us and Shadows, both very popular social bookmarking services. For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, social bookmarking is a way for you to store your bookmarks online, which makes them accessible from anywhere and allows you to share them with other people. You can tag your bookmarks in order to create on-the-fly categories for your pages making it easier for you to search. In the anarchy of self-created tags a strange cloud of data begins to form that allow you (as well as other users) to find data you might have missed by performing searches on those tags. del.icio.us is by far the more well known of the two services, although Shadows has the added benefit of allowing you to choose whether or not to share particular bookmarks. Flock can connect with either service, although it is designed to only be set to one. You can switch back and forth but as Flock moves your bookmarks back and forth I have heard this can cause unpredictable results, such as sharing your private Shadow pages publicly on del.icio.us.

I had never used these services previously as it always struck me as a waste of time to constantly be visiting some other website to store my bookmarks or blog subscriptions. Yeah, it is cool to share and the search offers a lot of possibilites, but I want it in my client. Which brings us right back to Flock.

These services are seamlessly integrated into Flock’s bookmarking system. When you want to add a page to your favorites, you click the star button (which you can see in the above photo nestled against the address bar), and you immediately have the option to tag and share the page, enter a comment, add it to one of your aggregated collections or all of the above.

Flock really gets this right. If these services are to be at all practical, they need to be part of the bookmarking process, not an extra step. I accumulated quite a few links online just as I sorted things because it was so easy. Now that I have started, I actually really like those services. I do have mild concerns about privacy, as I have visions of inexperienced users sharing much more than they intended or ever want to, however as this is geared towards the Web 2.0 consumer base, this may be an unfounded concern.

Favorites Manager

Since I’m talking about bookmarks I should mention the Favorites Manager. This is one area where Flock has really irritated me. The favorites manager builds an entire library of all your bookmarks which you can then search through, which works with the whole “search - don’t sort” philosophy, but in the end it just frustrated me. Essentially, if you want to access one of your favorites, you have to open the Favorites Manager and search through the library for page you are looking for. You can access favorites via the topbar, but you need to add it to one of your aggregated collections which you can then assign at will to the topbar. The library itself drove me up the wall. Eventually, I tried to put my favorites into categorized collections, which made it a little easier, but if you have too many favorites in a particular collection, they go off the side of the browser and you have to click an expand button to get to those other links, and occasionally the name of that page is replaced with the feed protocol of that page making it impossible to tell where it links to.

As much fun as it is to switch the topbar around on a whim, it gets irritating pretty fast, and I really hope they address this issue before the public release because I certainly don’t want to have to come up with thirty or so collections to hold all my links in a manageable form.

The other thing is that (just like with tags) an individual bookmark can belong to multiple collections, which actually sounds like a really good idea, but since the collections are what users populate the topbar with, it means even less space for your bookmarks. While the basic premise seems to fit nicely with the Web 2.0 tagging concept, it really just complicates the client application.

I’ve also noticed that occasionally links in my Favorites Manager and topbar will cease to work until I restart Flock. I attribute this to it being a developer preview, however, and I’m sure it will be fixed by the public beta in May.

RSS

Flock recognizes and will correctly interpret a link using the feed tag (e.g. feed:http://blog.andrlik.org/feed/) which is something that is a welcome sight. In fact, if you star a page that has a feed associated with it, the feed will be added to your favorites as well, which is pretty sweet. However, as an RSS reader, Flock just doesn’t work right now. For starters, there is no notification system, so the only way to know if there is new content is to manually check them by going into the Favorites Manager and opening the feed, which will be displayed in a very pretty digest view. However, if I’m clicking multiple feeds just to find out if there is something new, it really isn’t syndication anymore. I might as well just go to the site. If I don’t want to go to each feed individually, Flock can take an entire collection and aggregate all of the feeds within it into one digest view very similar to what Bloglines does, which is very nice, but still short of actual notification of new content.

In addition, the updating of feeds is exceptionally buggy. I would find updates on sites hours before it showed up in my Flock feeds, even after I manually refreshed them.

From what I’ve been able to gather, this is a development priority for the folks at Flock, and if it isn’t it needs to be. You can’t spell Web 2.0 without RSS… or something like that.

Blogging

This is actually the feature that drew me to checking out Flock, as I had heard quite a bit about the integrated blogging features. One really slick little feature is the Shelf. The Shelf is yet another topbar where you can add notes or drag links into in order to remember and use for a blog entry later.

This is a rather neat idea and it is very smoothly integrated into the interface. Then again, while it is certainly visually appealing, I’m not sure I like it as much as the Scrapbook extension for Firefox, which will take notes, capture pages, and then allow you to highlight lines or annotate those pages for your reference later. It’s definitely a nice feature to have native to the browser though.

The blog editor itself is a bit of a disappointment. For a browser so geared towards blogging, it was disappointing to see that the blog editor did not support trackbacks, which I really feel is a must for any serious blogger. The WYSIWYG editor was okay, although sometimes it would generate odd HTML which would look strange in my posts. This isn’t really a large problem because I prefer to compose my entries in source view anyway, but the lack of trackbacks and the fact that it sorts Wordpress categories based on their database id number rather than in alphabetical order was a little irritating. Also, I don’t like the fact that the category selector is a multiple-select box, which requires a lot of Ctrl-clicking. I really prefer the way Performancing for Firefox works, using checkboxes for category selection (like it is natively in Wordpress). Performancing also does trackbacks, sorts categories alphabetically, uploads images via FTP and even lets me view my Metrics stats.

Another thing that bothers me about the Flock blogging tool is that when you save drafts, they are stored inside of your Flock profile on your local hard drive. This seems a little strange to me, as every blog server application I am aware of supports draft posts. It would seem to make more sense that when you click the save button that it would be published as a draft (like PFF does it), that way you can pick it up again whenever you want from any computer. The other problem with this approach is that if you delete or edit posts via another computer or application, Flock still uses its original saved copy in the profile, which means that unless you only blog or administer your blog from Flock, things can get a little ugly.

Flock has made a smart move and incorporated spell-check into the browser itself, utilizing the Spellbound extension for Mozilla and Firefox. This is a very nice feature which I believe is also planned for Firefox 2.0 as well. However, Flock doesn’t have a way to activate Spellbound’s spell-check while you type feature, which I love using in Firefox. Since it is compiled into the browser as opposed to being an extension, the user doesn’t have access to activate that feature if it even exists in their version. I did check about:config and was unable to find a setting to activate it, so I suspect it just is not available in Flock.

Unfortunately, Flock also has a problem with interface responsiveness at times (see the bit about the randomly crippled favorites above), which means that text inputed from the keyboard doesn’t always show up immediately on the screen and is sometimes misinterpreted causing quite a bit of frustration when writing a post or email via the browser. I have no idea if this is a common experience for Flock users during this developer preview or not, but it only seems to occur when I am using Flock.

Progress

I did download one of the nightly test builds to see if any of these bugs or issues have been addressed and they seem to be just as prevalent. Hopefully, they will be resolved by the May release.

Controversy

It is worth mentioning that there has been some friction in the community of Mozilla users (although from what I have heard the Firefox and Flock teams are very supportive of each other) regarding Flock’s existence. It seems that there are a lot of people who feel that the Flock project should have been limited to developing extensions for Firefox, rather than building an entirely new browser separate from Mozilla and earning their own search revenue. There has been a lot of name-calling and accusations of “ripping off” Firefox. This seems absurd to me.

The point of open-source is that the code is free to be used and modified within the confines of its license, which allows for greater innovation and allows new products to be developed in a community of cooperation in order to meet user needs. Flock is a new browser, yes. However, it is a browser that is targeted to a very specific market of Internet users, whereas Firefox is designed for general purpose use. Flock is a browser designed to meet the needs of bloggers right out of the box with no additional extensions; Firefox is set up to be a slick no-frills browser that is infinitely extensible. While I will agree that the Flock team’s claim that Flock is not a fork of the Mozilla code is somewhat ridiculous, I also think it is silly that people are upset about its creation. It’s called innovation, folks.

A Conclusion of Sorts

Flock is a browser with a lot of promise, and I really like where it is going. That being said, this preview is pretty buggy, and the features that were most important to me were disappointing (blogging) or in some cases crippled (RSS). At this point I think I get much more value and enjoyment out of my Firefox extensions, and they work a lot better for blogging. The only thing I really wish is that Firefox integrated their bookmark system with web services as it is in Flock. Although, maybe that code will find its way into a future version of Firefox. After all, that’s the beauty of open source.

I’ll be watching closely as Flock develops and I look forward to checking it out again once it gets closer to being a finished product. For now, though, I think I’ll stick with Firefox.

Tried the Flock browser? Agree/Disagree? Think I’m full of it? Leave a comment!

If you are a blogger, you have probably already heard about Performancing.com. If you haven’t yet, or have procrastinated on checking out the site, you really need to go there this very instant.

Well, after you finish reading this.

Performancing describes itself as a “group weblog of professional bloggers, for professional bloggers,” and in that they are sincere. There write consistently well constructed and interesting posts on the subject of blogging, and offer a lot of great tips and advice. However, Performancing is quickly becoming a whole lot more. Just a few short weeks ago, they launched the public beta of Performancing Metrics, which is a free statistics service for your blog. In that time, they have grown and are now tracking over 10,000 blogs.

Metrics has one of the fastest and most attractive interfaces I have ever seen in a statistics service, which from what I can determine is done in the always sexy combination of CSS, AJAX and PHP. The service is in beta at this point and is still missing a few features that are still being developed, such as the ability to exclude your own IP address, or to get the highly detailed geographical data that Statcounter offers. However, all of that is being worked on as they fine tune the service to meet the community’s needs. For those of you using AdSense, you should definitely check this out, as Metrics compiles your Google AdSense stats by default. Metrics will also track comments your blog receives and which posts appear to be the most popular. And as I said, Metrics is fast. This is a breath of fresh air compared to the slow (if extremely useful) interface of Statcounter, or the debilitating effect on your page load speed when using Google Analytics.

Performancing has been really great about publishing a really slick and easy-to-use API for developing your own applications that use Metrics data, which has led to everything from simple code to display a counter on your page, to a user-developed plugin for Google Desktop.

Metrics can also track multiple blogs under one free account, with apparently no stated limit so feel free to track your whole blog network there! As it is in beta right now, you should probably continue to run your old solution along side of it to ensure you are getting the most out of your stats, but I can’t wait to see the next step in Metrics’ development.

Okay, I’ve rambled on about Metrics enough, and there is still one more awesome free product from Performancing to discuss. Performancing Firefox is an extension for the popular web-browser which allows you to post, edit and manage your blog in a panel. The extension is really feature-rich, with support for services such as Wordpress.org, Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, and MSN Spaces. If you host your own blog, you can still use this extension to connect to applications powered by Wordpress, Movable Type, Drupal, Textpattern, Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API. Once you have added your blog you are all set to begin writing your blogs. PFF includes Technorati tag support, categories, trackbacks, del.icio.us support, and the ability to save additional notes. The editor has a friendly WYSIWYG interface, as well as my preferred source-based editor, and a live preview feature (unfortunately not yet using your blog’s CSS, but I believe that is in the works). If you install the Spellbound extension, you will have access to spell check in both Firefox and PFF.

Like Metrics, PFF is a beta release so there are a few weird little quirks, that I wouldn’t go so far as to call bugs, but the folks at Performancing are actively seeking out feedback as they improve the application.

Really, this is just an amazing extension and a must-have for any blogger. In fact, I’m composing this entry in PFF right now. Download it now.

I cannot adequately express how impressed I am with Performancing.com, and I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us in the future.

As usual, my review is being written somewhat late.

This Saturday, I went to go see V for Vendetta at the local IMAX. I have to admit that despite my excitement, I was very worried. I am a big fan of the comic and have read it countless times, and while I knew that some things would change I was unsure of what Hollywood would do with such a story. I knew that Alan Moore, the original author of the comic, had requested to have his name removed from the credits, but also knew that Moore’s frustration with D.C. Comics was a heavy influence in that. Also, after the intestinal scrape of Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions, I didn’t have much faith in the Wachowski brothers.

What a relief!

The film held true to the story in all the best ways. Those ideas that would require clunky exposition in such a medium were carefully adapted, which while changing some of the subplots, effectively rendered the movie much more accessible for an unfamiliar audience. Alterations in the film also served to clear up ambiguities and factual errors in the original script (at the time it was written for comics there was a nuclear war involved as no one knew the true extent of such a war would be). In addition, the movies added thrills and action that propel the story along.

I would love to comment more on specific scenes from the film, but I really don’t want to spoil it for you. I will say that if you loved the comic, you will love the movie, and if you have never read the comic, you will after leaving the theater.

I was also going to use the blogger privilege of being unprofessional and bash a few critics for their obvious lack of research into the source material, but I’ll refrain. After all, good web karma is something I should keep in supply.

In short, go see this film. And if you get a chance where you live, see it on an IMAX screen. You won’t be disappointed.

Seen the movie? Agree/Disagree? Think I am full of it? Leave a comment!

I haven’t posted in a few days, in part because I’ve been pretty busy, and partly because I’ve been overhauling my system with a brand new Linux distribution.

I’m now running Gentoo and I absolutely love it. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Gentoo is special flavor of Linux that gives all the control back to the user. Absolutely every detail of your environment can be optimized for your hardware and configured to your taste. In addition, Gentoo uses a brilliant and practical approach to package management: Portage. With Portage, all packages are downloaded and compiled from scratch in order to ensure compatibility with your system. Best of all, Gentoo provides an environment variable called USE, that allows you to define what options Portage should use when compiling, which allows you to avoid needing to download a lot of excess dependencies that will only bog down your system if you have no intention of using those features. For example, if I set part of my USE variable to “-gnome kde”, my software will not be compiled with any Gnome support, which is just fine by me as I hate Gnome and never use it. Only the KDE components of the package will be compiled which saves me a lot of time and space in the long run.

Of course, like all good things this flexibility comes at an intimidating price. In order to install Gentoo, you need to manually install and compile your whole system from source. Certainly a non-trivial task, and it scared me away from it for a while. I actually attempted installing Gentoo a while ago, and successfully wrote my configuration files, compiled my kernel and was able to boot successfully into my new environment. Unfortunately, the automated configure scripts for my X server were not able to identify my graphics card and after a couple days of frustration as I tried to manually write my xorg.conf file, I gave up and went back to SuSE 9.3. I had projects I was working on and couldn’t afford the time away from my graphical desktop to fiddle with it. Oh, but it haunted me.

You see, I knew that Gentoo was what I really wanted, and it frustrated me that I gave up on it. My inner geek was emasculated by my failure to complete the installation. It ate at me day after day, and I found myself idly surfing the Gentoo forums debating to try another seven hour installation process.

The final straw was when Gentoo released their graphical LiveCD installer disk. The graphical installer is still experimental as is the dialog based command line installer on the disk, which is fine as those application are designed to make the process faster NOT easier. If I hadn’t had experience with the Gentoo manual install I would have had no idea what I was doing. Now, I don’t say this to scare you all away, but I just want to make sure no one goes and downloads the LiveCD iso thinking that it will do it all for them. I cannot stress enough how important a solid understanding of the manual install process works (which you can still use the LiveCD for). The graphical installer certainly did speed up the process quite a bit, but the best part of the new LiveCD is not the installer, it’s the embedded Gnome environment with sample applications. During the long compilations I was able to browse the web, chat on Gaim and play a few games, which made the installation time fly by. In addition, if you are using the graphical installer and instruct it to install Xorg then it will copy its dynamically generated xorg.conf file to your new system configuration, which you may need to tweak later, but it will be functional.

Since then, I’ve been playing with Gentoo, adding programs and tweaking my configuration. I did have some initial trouble getting my OpenGL acceleration working, which turned out to be a hardware problem with my computer’s chipset. Simple solution: I picked up an ATI Radeon 9250 video card, which I really should have gotten a while ago anyway. I recompiled my kernel (which is really no sweat once you’ve done it once or twice and gotten past the intimidation factor), installed the new drivers from Portage and ran the configuration script. It works beautifully!

Gentoo is certainly not for weak of heart, and you have to be willing to spend some time getting it all set up. However, once it is up and running it is one of the fastest and most stable distros I have ever used. If you work for it, you will be rewarded.

Just about every fan of the creative team of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean has heard of the new movie MirrorMask, and just about every fan waited as impatiently as I for it to reach the theaters. In fact, I was beginning to fear it wouldn’t reach many cinema houses at all. Which is why I was thrilled to discover that it had finally begun playing in Wisconsin, and it was with great anticipation that I sat down to see the film.

MirrorMask takes us on a bizarre surrealistic journey. It is the story of a young girl named Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), whose family runs a circus. As a rebellious child she finds herself in the unusual position of being a child who wishes to run away from the circus and join real life. Shortly after a fight with Helena, her mother (Gina McKee) falls very sick and is hospitalized. It isn’t clear what is wrong with her, but some kind of brain surgery is implied at this point. Helena is racked with guilt and one night upon going to sleep she wakes up in another land populated with creatures from her own drawings, a land where everyone wears a mask. She learns that the land is dying because the Queen of Light (also McKee) has fallen into a comatose state because a magical charm is missing. Teaming up with a traveling juggler named Valentine (Jason Barry), Helena sets out to recover the charm and restore the Queen of Light so that she might return home.

You may read this and feel that this movie seems like standard storybook fare, and you would be right. And you would also be very wrong.

What makes this film so different is McKean’s bizarre, even disturbing visual designs. Helena is stalked by eyeball-spiders, winged cats with man-faces and even stranger creatures at the palace of the Queen of Shadows (McKee again). The movie is simply a treasure to behold and the beauty of the bizarre surroundings Helena and Valentine travel through are almost overwhelming in their strangeness. Here is where the magic of Gaiman’s script comes in, as his skill with language adds a sort of matter-of-fact wonderment to McKean’s dreamscape. There is a beauty to this world that I guess at this point I should just expect from this team of world-builders, yet they surprise me every time.

MirrorMask is not so much a film as it is an experience to immerse yourself in. I will admit that the story is pretty typical, even predictable at points. Often I found myself spending more of my attention at the visual style than I did paying attention to the story which is a very rare thing for me. I found myself really wishing for a stronger tale behind the visual artistry, but for some bizarre reason it didn’t detract much from my enjoyment of the film. This is an entertaining rarity for me, as I truly believe that story is king in any medium.

I do recommend MirrorMask and I heartily encourage you to go see it if it comes anywhere close to you. I caution you though, this movie may not be what you expect, and that if you are not careful, some of McKean’s bizarre creations may haunt your dreams.

Seen the movie? Agree/Disagree? Think I am full of it? Leave a comment!

I recently came upon a Boing Boing post regarding a new online store serving up digital media for the public. The store is Common Media, which has been supplying free fair-use media for a while now, but as a commerce site it comes in two flavors: Common Tunes and Common Flix, which are music and video stores respectively. What is so significant about this service that I feel the need to write you a review?

There are two reasons.

One, this service primarily uses BitTorrent for the distribution of products, which means that as the service gains popularity the rate of downloads will increase exponentially with very low additional bandwidth costs to their server, which also further demonstrates the legitimate business uses of the BitTorrent system. Now, Common Media is not alone is utilizing torrents to serve up purchased media, several other sites have also risen that have recognized the value in using BitTorrent.

What is significant about Common Media is that it is completely DRM-less. That’s right, Common Media only sells and serves up media that is free of digitally imposed use restrictions. This is excellent news for consumers, as they will be able to enjoy their purchases in any fashion they choose. They will no longer be restricted to utilizing commercially produced players such as WMP, Winamp or iTunes. Windows users will be able to listen to music in any media playing software, which is wonderful as some of the best software for Windows (e.g. Quintessential Player, musikCube) are not able to play DRM media because their creators have refused to sell their souls away, or are open source and thus cannot use the proprietary DRM code.

This is cause for rejoicing among Linux users as they will be able to take advantage of the digital media movement in commerce. Currently, users of the open-source operating system have been unable to participate in this movement due to the inability of open-source applications to utilize DRM. As a result, such services have been restricted to use in Windows or Mac environments. In the past Linux users have found ways to run iTunes or Napster under Windows emulation, but the DRM encoded in the files themselves have always been problematic to solve. I for one have no problem whatsoever paying for my songs and movies, in fact I will happily do so if I can actually get to enjoy them. As a Linux user I am thrilled at the ability to purchase files that I can enjoy without rebooting into Windows or rerecording the file.

The music and film providers also do well in this deal as they receive 70% of all the proceeds from sales of their products which are transferred to them via PayPal each quarter.

The site itself is relatively simple to navigate with a rather slick Live Search feature for finding the offered files. Items that need to be purchased are prefaced with a ”$”.

Okay, I’ve been raving about this for a little bit, let’s also take a quick peek at some of the negatives.

Well, the service is very new, and it will probably take a little work to convince artists of the commercial advantages of using this site to distribute their work, so the selection is somewhat limited. Although there is still quite a bit to choose from and new bands/filmmakers to find. In fact, this will probably be the ideal method of publicizing and releasing independent work. Also, BitTorrent can be a limitation in itself if users refuse to reseed the files they download. It’s pretty easy to do this, just leave your BitTorrent clients running so others who purchase the file can also take advantage of the swarming algorithm to download files quickly. Until users get accustomed to doing so, this will be a challenge for every commercial site that attempts to use BitTorrent.

Lastly, the site only accepts credit cards for payment via 2Checkout.com’s reliable order management. As iTunes and Napster support PayPal, Common Media will need this to able to compete, and it seems like a reasonable addition as their providers are paid utilizing the ubiquitous payment management service that every Internet user has come to know and love. I contacted Jeff Reifman at Common Media regarding this issue, and he explained how since the site is still in development they are focusing on one payment system in order to keep their programming focused and maximize their coding resources. He did indicate that Common Media would like to incorporate PayPal purchases in the future, and that there has even been discussion of utilizing services such as the new cell phone providers that allow their customers to pay for services via messaging. Incorporation of these additional and ultra-convenient payment methods would certainly make the store a force to be reckoned with.

In conclusion, while it is definitely early in its development, Common Media is a welcome change in the arena of digital commerce and I am excited about the possibilities and freedoms it will give back to the forgotten people of that industry: the consumers.