BlogBridge 2.3 Reloaded

8 October 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge

I’ve just finished uploading an updated version 2.3 to our Java Web Start deployment location. This fix pack incorporates one important fix which hit the users, who prefer to sort articles in ascending order where oldest come first.

The other patch is connected to a navigation. When you hit “go to next … article” command and there are some folded groups on your way, an invisible article will be selected instead of the next visible one.

And the last fix adds back (did you know about it?) “copy article text” functionality which was unintentionally lost. Now you can select a text of an article with mouse and use standard CTRL-C (or whatever analog on Mac) to copy the selected piece into the system clipboard.

Enjoy!

Book for VJ’s is out

7 October 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting vj

The world of graphics was always exciting. Who from us didn’t wish to create something really coverful and impressive some day? Most of the time I think that it’s not my business and I don’t have time for that, but once I see some really brilliant masterpice of modern art (which is also very simple technically), I start to think “ah, I could do that as well. OK, let me download some painting software and try myself in it once again (as I did it almost thousand of times before).” Yeah, the same thing with a video and video performances. It’s usually expected that when we grow bigger this childish approach to life activities disappears, but, in fact, sometimes it grows bigger following your new possibilities. To be honest, it happens to me very often. That’s why I was really excited to learn that a friend of David Pescovitz has just released his new book called “The VJ Book: Inspirations and Practical Advice for Live Visuals Performance.

Mind-mapping with FreeMind

7 October 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ interesting

Recently I’ve discovered a terrific tool for brainstorming and thoughts organizing — FreeMind — and it became one of my favorites in the blink of an eye. Everyone, or at least good deal of us, knows what brainstorming is — it’s a process of the exploration of some idea when you analyze its aspects and aspects of an aspects from all sides. Often, people use white- and blackboards to write down their thoughts or just a plain paper for the same purpose. Personally, I always wrote some kind of text, explaining the idea, digging deeper into it. The time wore off and what I found myself doing was dealing with proper statements, language structures, text formating, breaking things into lines and paragraphs and doing other time consuming actions distracting from the main goal — focusing on the topic. Can it be better? Absolutely.

BlogBridge 2.3

6 October 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge

Wonderful things are happening all around us… We have just released another BlogBridge version (2.3) featuring shining new photo feeds display and lots of small yet dead necessary fixes. I have never seen in any other aggregator available nowadays with such a pleasant and useful feature, like an iPhoto-like view for photo blogs (feeds).

Gmail Drives Windows Shell Extension

6 October 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting

There’s a new Windows shell extension available for lovers of the Gmail service — Gmail Drives. The add-on connects a new drive to your system, allowing to store arbitrary files using a space available at your Gmail account. It could be very helpful. Just think of it as another drive on the net.

Increadible Painting Experience

6 October 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting

Eric Grohe demonstrates unbelieveable creativity. He paints unusual and extremely impressive pictures on the walls. His creations are supposed to bring more colors and space into our grayed out cubicle living, prolonging the space and time. I can swear he has much more works. Does anyone know some other locations on the net to enjoy his wonderful art? Before: After:

Accelerating The Future

5 October 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ interesting

Yesterday I saw a wonderful post by Francois Gossieaux telling us, the readers, about his own observations of the Web 2.0 evolution. It required some time to structure my own thoughts on this and here I would like to comment just a few of his points and broaden the discussion onto the whole world of software development carried on nowadays.

Many of the new web 2.0 companies are built by a few passionate individuals - and with budgets that fit on credit cards. And forget about traditional marketing expenses - it’s all word-of-mouth, sometimes enhanced with a few dollars worth of search engine marketing - but gone are the days of expensive direct marketing campaigns and traditional promotions. It’s all about influencing the influencers - but more on that later…

Advanced Installer for Java Goes On Mac

5 October 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ java development interesting

Hooray! Wonderful news knocking at the door — Advanced Installer for Java (3.3) goes on Mac; and this is a really big step forward. We, as the proud users of AIFJ, are extremely happy to have an opportunity to build the Mac distributions of our application — BlogBridge — without serious messing with console. When we were choosing the installer for the application our main criteria was the presence of the Windows platform support. The Mac support was preferred but rather optional as we knew how to build a distribution package from the command line or with a console script. Of course, having this process automated means a big boost in our performance. A lot of thanks to you guys!

Also the team reports the following changes:

Inclusion and exclusion filters for Synchronized Folders.

Editing multiple files’ properties at once.

File version override.

Stretched or fixed size switch for dialog banners and bitmaps.

Configurable Merge Modules.

KlipFolio and Future Desktop Thoughts

5 October 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ interesting

Here comes an interesting piece of software — KlipFolio. It’s the desktop-integrated RSS reader and can do far more than that. It is capable of showing stock news, the weather and lots of other interesting bits of information. Here’s what the authors tell about their creation:

It’s the smallest, smartest and most configurable RSS Dashboard on the planet. KlipFolio can be used to monitor anything you want online–like weather, stocks, Hotmail, news, RSS feeds and even auctions–right on your desktop.

Police Robot or… Police-Robot

5 October 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting

Never heard of a bigger stupidity than this — Robot inspects bank robber’s mouth for bomb. Well, I still think I have a good sense of humor, but wasn’t it a human who ordered the robot to scan the mouth of a guy, which makes the situation sound less funny, if it was done seriously and intentionally. Or maybe the picture was fabricated in Photoshop? :)

Hey, people, are you all robots out there? Turn on your brains!