It’s News to Me

I have finally regained my connection to the Internet this afternoon. Yesterday morning when I awoke, I found that my Comcast connection to the Internet was intermittently connecting but wouldn't sustain the connection. At the end of the day, I called tech support and they had me perform a couple of tests and then concluded they would have to send out a technician to try to resolve the issue.

He arrived today at about 10:30 AM and replaced the splitter that subdivides the incoming line into the four separate lines that lead to three televisions and to my cable modem. After he did that, the connection was restored. As they say, "you never miss the water until the well runs dry." Being without my connection only served to underscore for me how much I rely on the Internet throughout each day.

Today I downloaded the latest version of Flock 0.7.0.8.0 build_id: 1147436002.4225 and installed it. It's getting better with each build, but I am getting an error message that a script has stopped responding. I suspect it is related to syncing my favorites on del.icio.us, but that is only a guess.

technorati tags: Flock

Apparent glitch, originally uploaded by CaptQuirk.

Flock is still in the pre-release developers preview stage, so it isn't surprising that everything isn't yet working as it should.

One of those things that isn't working on my system as I would expect it to is the newly-renamed "My News" function. With it you can subscribe to a site's RSS feed and receive notification, via a change in color of the My News icon on the icon bar (from white to orange), when the feed is updated. Once you've read the feed, you can (in theory) mark it as read and thereby change the bold font displaying the feed's name in the sidebar to a normal font. That's the way it is supposed to work at least.

For the last several builds, up to and including this morning's build — Flock 0.7.0.6.1.0 build_id: 1147073320.4097, marking the feed as read has no effect on the characteristics of the feed in the sidebar as is illustrated by the screenshot.

I've begun downloading a new build of Flock each morning just to see whether the previous potholes I had encountered have been patched. So far the My News feed problem hasn't. However, I was pleased to see that another problem (bug #1577) that has existed in both Firefox and Flock for some time appears to have been fixed. So potholes do get patched, and I'm sure that the one for this minor annoyance for My News will be fixed too eventually.

I knew when I embarked on this journey of testing Flock "there'd be days like this" so I'm not too concerned about this bug. But posting my comments about it here gives me a chance to elaborate on it a bit more than I can when posting a bug report and it gives me something to talk about on my blog. Hence my comments this morning.

I have previously blogged about the virtue (as I see it) of being able to customize your applications to your own preferences. This afternoon I see that Daryl has made a plea for such customization of a feature in Flock, the alerts he receives from the Flickr Photo browser. He said:

In its current form, with some of the contacts I happen to have on my list, the photo topbar provides more of a distraction than a benefit. It provokes me far too often to stop what I'm doing so that I can look at photos of little consequence.

Daryl’s Flock Blog

I know what he's talking about, and in general I agree with his proposed solution or at least with some variation of it. I'd like the ability to turn off notifications when some of my Flickr contacts post pictures and to specify how frequently I am notified about updates to their photostream. If I could specify that for some contacts I want to be notified as soon as they've posted their photo and for others that I want to be notified only once an hour of their updates, that would be an improvement over the current way it operates, I think.

But the point of this post is to raise the question for Flock's developers of whether they are really willing to give us to the ability to fine tune Flock's functions. There is, of course, an Options section in the Tools menu where I can specify a variety of preferences, such as which web services I use, which search engines I want as the default, which blogging service I use, etc., but in my conversations with them, I've met with some resistance (it seems) to building in a lot of configurability into Flock.

I've seen this resistance with regard to at least two of the functions that make Flock unique, the blog editor and the web snippets area location.

In its initial incarnation, the blog editor was a free-floating separate window that tended to get lost, particularly if you ran your browser maximized. Next the blog editor opened in a tab, not in a separate window. Since the editor has recently been improved and updated (completely re-written, if I understand correctly), it opens in a separate pop-up window that by default is opened on top of other windows. Right now there is no way to set it to open instead in a tab, and I have yet to see any discussion of the fact that the option to change that default behavior is going to be available. I have, however, seen a number of user comments indicating they would prefer to have it open in a tab. I don't think it should be only one way. Let the user choose which he or she prefers.

The web snippets feature (previously called The Shelf) was originally a topbar just like the photo browser or the Mapper function. In its most recent rendition, it is located in an area at the bottom of the browser window that auto-opens when you drag a web snippet to it. (Web snippets are nothing more than a bit of text, a graphic or a link that you find on the web that you want to retain, perhaps for later use in a blog post.) Back when it was a topbar, there was some discussion of making it a sidebar or a bottom bar instead. At that time, I said my preference was for us users to have the option of making it either, simply another thing that we could specify as we saw fit.

The resistance I sense among the developers to that idea goes something like this. "We don't want the browser to become bloated, and besides most users would end up just using the defaults anyway. And what's more, many users might find it hard to discover the configuration options." They are the developers, of course, and I am only a user, so I can't argue with the point that providing user preference options might contribute to bloat. However, I don't think the argument that most users might use the defaults or that many of them might not discover the configuration options holds much water. Though both suppositions may be true, that isn't any reason to deny users, who are willing to explore the features of the product and want choices, the option to "have it our way."

So as I write in support of Daryl's idea, I also would like to prod the Flock developers to become more open to giving the user greater choice about how Flock behaves. Stop short of making the code bloated, but go as far as possible in providing users choice. It's easier to create fans if give them the ability to control the application through configuring it to their desires.

technorati tags: Flock, configuration, choice

At least the "Blog this" function at Flickr enables me to post a picture as the previous entry illustrates, however neither changing the theme nor trying to post a small version of a picture instead of a large one works yet when dragging pictures to the blog editor in Flock. Despite this, it still doesn't seem as if it is the blog editor in Flock that is at fault. Here's why I think that. When I create the post, the blog editor saves a copy of the post on my hard disk. I can look at that .html file and in the version on my hard disk, everything looks normal. So it seems that something in the process of publishing the post to WordPress.com strips out a part of the code and therefore causes the picture not to appear. That is true with the two themes I have tried this morning, so I'm not convinced that it is due to the theme I am using. Fortunately, Erwan and Daryl are looking into this problem to see if they can diagnose what is causing it and perhaps fix that.

I'll just have to await further development of the blog editor and the development team's investigation to get a resolution. In the mean time I can work around the problem if I need to post a picture by using Flickr's "Blog this" option.

In the most recent build of the blog editor I am pleased to see that a spell checking option has been added. Heaven knows I need help spelling and while a typo or two isn't something I'm going to stress out about, I do like to spell check my posts before I publish them.

Flock's news reader, originally uploaded by CaptQuirk.

This screenshot illustrates Flock's new implementation of its RSS news reader, called "My Newspaper." The icon to call up the sidebar is designated by the red arrow pointing to the iconbar. In the list of RSS feeds, the bold font indicates unread items on that particular feed.

The photo is being posted, this time, using Flickr's Blog This option, so I am doing further testing to see whether it will post successfully with the Flickr tool.

I have changed the theme so that I can test whether doing so will permit me to post pictures here. So again, I’ll see if I can get the photo of “My Newspaper” from my Flickr site to post.

technorati tags: Flock, test

This morning I took this screenshot of Fock's Newspaper (i.e., its RSS news reader) illustrating how it looks when the feeds have been updated.

technorati tags: Flock, RSS, newsreader

The lastest version of Flock, soon to be released in beta and codenamed "Cardinal," has improved the way RSS feeds are handled. The feed reader in Flock is called My Newspaper, and it is represented by an icon in the icon bar that looks like a newspaper (what else?) and is positioned just to the left of the icon for starring a favorite (which, in Flock's terminology, equates to marking a site as a favorite).

It was reasonably instinctive to me how to open the My Newspaper sidebar (just click the My Newspaper icon), but how to add a feed to the newspaper didn't seem as immediately obvious. So once I figured out how to do it, I decided to record a short video and upload it to YouTube to illustrate the process.

If you'd like to view the video, click here.

Update 4/30/06: If I had done a bit more research before posting, I might have found the explanation of how to subscribe to feeds in the specifications for the Cardinal distribution of Flock. But like so many others, I first see if I can do something without reading the directions, and only when that fails do I turn to reading the instructions.

technorati tags: video, Flock, RSS, Feedreader

I saw this comment (#7) over on Mike Neel's blog this morning and decided I'd better post something here on my blog before such comments begin appearing in my comment section. So let me try to catch you up on some of the things that have been capturing my attention during the last week or so.

Yesterday morning I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me about the upcoming Cardinal release of Flock sometime in May. If I understand correctly, Cardinal will be the first actual beta version of Flock. Up until now, all the releases have been termed a "developer preview," and they were accompanied by a warning that the software wasn't even to the beta stage yet. Despite that very preliminary, and yes even buggy, version of the browser, I began using it back in November as my default browser. At any rate, yesterday I decided to download the latest "daily build" of Flock to see what has changed, so I downloaded version 0.7.0.3.0 and installed it. A number of changes have been made, some of which I like and some of which I don't.

For instance, I am now using the new built-in blogging editor for this post. When you press the hot key for it (Ctrl-B), the editor pops up a separate window, which is okay I suppose, but one of the things I notice immediately that there is no way to enter categories for the post. That means that posting to the blog will have to be a two-staged adventure. First, I can draft the post in the editor, but afterwards I'll have to open the post in WordPress and change the categories there. That is not very efficient and surely it is an oversight.

Also the editor doesn't seem to separate paragraphs with a space when you press Enter. I won't know how the post will appear on the blog until I publish it, but if it doesn't add the space between paragraphs I'll have to add them during that second stage of editing the post when I am adding the categories. I can, of course, modify my behavior to add those extra CR/LF (carriage return / line feeds) when I'm editing the post, once I discover how the editor treats them, but this behavior is a departure from the previous versions of the editor and to me it seems an undesirable change. Also this version of the blog editor no longer has a spell checker built in. Given my poor spelling skills, that is definitely not an improvement.

Another change in this version of the software is that the widget for selecting which collection is displayed at the top of the browser has been moved from the left side of the window to the right. Why? I have no idea. Again I can get used to that, but it doesn't seem to be an improvement to me and I see no rationale for the change.

What used to be called "the shelf" is now referred to as web snippets, and its location has been moved from the topbar to the bottom window. A feature has been added that allows you to highlight text, graphics, and links and drag them to the bottom of the window which causes the web snippet window to open automatically where the item can then be deposited. Once you've done that, moving the cursor back to the browser window closes the web snippet window. I think the rationale for this change was to make the web snippet window easier to use. I'll just have to see whether this configuration proves easier and more desirable. So far, I'm not convinced that it is.

One of the things that I do like about the new version is the modification they have made to the photo browser. I can now see all the photos of my friends on Flickr instead of just the ones that are public, meaning that I can see the photos that are classified by the photographer as for "friends and family" only when I am one of their contacts. That makes sense and is a change that needed to be made. Also the developers have added a link to each photograph that permits you to drag either a small or a large version of the photo to your blog post. I'm pleased with that capability. Previously you could only drag a small version of the picture so this new ability gives greater choice, and I'm almost always in favor of that.

So, despite my kvetching about the little niggling things I don't like about the newest version of Flock, I'm still a big fan of this browser because I've become reliant on the tools it provides for interacting with the web. I like the fact that when I mark something as a favorite in the browser it updates my del.icio.us site.

Flock is very innovative in the ways it encourages you to participate online rather than to merely observe content that others have generated. And since I favor all of us contributing to what's online, I think Flock will make a major contribution to that capability. Other browsers are like radios (one-way conversation) whereas Flock is more like a telephone.

Update: Upon publishing from the blog editor, I discovered to my delight that I did have the option for adding categories after all because upon pressing the "publish" button I was presented with a list of my categories from which to choose, and when I clicked on the "advanced" button I found that I could even enter Technorati tags too. So the paragraphs in which I complain about those absent features just reflects my lack of familiarity with the features. On the other hand, my observations about the CR/LF issue were correct, so in the future I'll know that if I want a blank line between paragraphs when I'm using the blog editor, I'll have to put them there. That's not hard to do, though, so I'll just modify my behavior to account for the way it works.

technorati tags: Flock, Cardinal, Web2.0

After evaluating SnagIt for my 30 day trial period, I decided to go ahead and register it.  I’ve used it to create a few screencasts, mostly for the purpose of teaching myself to use SnagIt, but I can see great value in screencasts in general.  While it is possible to write out a description of how to do something, nothing quite matches seeing the actions that would otherwise have to be read and visualized mentally. 

I first became impressed with screencasts when I watched this one on editing in Wikipedia by Jon Udell.  Since friends occasionally seek my help in doing something with their computer, I have found screencasts to be a great way to do a demonstration that they can watch at their leisure and replay as often as they find it necessary to do so.  Also if you create a screencast for one friend, you can share it with others too by posting it on the web at places like YouTube or Google Videos.  My first efforts at using SnagIt to produce these screencasts (like the ones here and here) have been rather amateurish, but I am hopeful that, with practice, I’ll get better at it.  I suppose we’ll see.

Another tool that I think would be quite useful for me, if Flock were a supported browser for it, is Roboform.  It is a secure password safe and form-filler that eliminates the possibility of malicious keyloggers capturing your passwords as you enter them on web sites. Also Roboform has many other handy features that make it desirable.  Despite the fact that Flock is based on Firefox, for some reason when I installed Roboform on my system, it indicates that Flock is an unsupported browser.  However, it does work with Internet Explorer and Firefox.  

Another recent discovery that I think is potentially quite useful is GSpace, an extension for Firefox, that permits you to have what amounts to FTP access to your Gmail account (if you have one) so that you can use some of that 2 GB of storage on Gmail to upload files that you might want to be able to access from anywhere.  If you don’t want to carry around a thumbdrive with your files on it, just use the GSpace extension in your Firefox browser in combination with your Gmail account. 

By the way, I found a link to an article that led me to this GSpace extension on Paul Stamatiou’s blog, which turns out to be an amazing resource for valuable information.  I’ve found reading Paul’s blog on a daily basis to be an educational experience.  (And an irritating one to boot when I consider the fact that he is a very bright 19 year old student at Ga  Tech.   Talk about bright futures!)