David Little

I’ve been very busy with Plone stuff at work recently and we’ve launched two new sites which we’re all very impressed with. The gradual ascent of the learning curve continues and there are plenty of things I need to write down before I forget them — and loads of new things to get to grips with — including performance / caching, nailing down LDAP integration and polishing off the move to filesystem development and all the potentially exciting things that will bring with it. Yes, I know I need to get out more, although whether I’ll be able to once I’ve got stuck into my copy of Professional Plone Development by Martin Aspeli, I don’t yet know.

So, instead of writing anything sensible this month (I wish I could update this blog more often than that but, let’s be realistic), here’s a list of the things I think are exceptionally cool web- and technology-wise; and maybe not so cool. Yes, the easiest kind of blog post: the brain dump.

Moo.com is the obvious hands-down winner for me in the cool stakes. Why? It’s brilliant, that’s why. You can make stuff out of your digital photos. Not a new idea in itself — we’ve been able to put photos of our pets on to shapeless t-shirts that shrink to gnome-size on the first cold wash or those blurry holiday snaps on to mouse mats for some time now. Where Moo is different is the stuff that you display your meisterwerken on is in itself cool beyond reproach. I’ve just got some minicards made up — small business cards that have your photos on one side and text on the other. The text is limited to five lines so you can’t write essays, so even the most designed-challenged will get something decent. Image-wise you can select stock images or import your own from Flickr or other sites. Brilliant, and that the next year’s worth of birthday presents sorted then.

I’m not normally given to salivating over gadgets. Although I’ve got my fair share of them (phone, camera, MP3), I’ve certainly never really been given over to getting excited about things that cost too much and will be superceded two minutes after you’ve bought them. I’ve steered clear of the whole iPod thing and my Rio Karma is still going strong three years in (unlike Rio by the looks of things). It plays music in more formats than is strictly necessary — I have actually got a couple of albums in FLAC format, honest — and I’ve only just getting to the point where I’ve filled up my 20Gb.

Just two seconds looking at the new iPod Touch however and I was reaching for my Amazon wish-list. I know it’s wrong, but I want one. It’s an MP3 and video player, you can surf the web on wifi, and that interface (self re-orientating, touch-sensitive screen) made we want to do a wee. But, returning to reality for a second do I really need one? Well, yes, of course I do, but I did find some negative reviews of it. One obvious thing is that it only has 16Gb capacity (Flash memory, no hard drive), it has no Flash (as in Adobe) support and you’re tied to Safari to browse (it could be a lot worse, let’s face it). It also appears to have added evil functionality, namely the ability to find out what’s playing in Starbucks as you’re ordering your corporate whore double evil-spresso and the ability to download whatever musical criminality you’re being subjected to via iTunes to your player. Starbucks and iTunes? That’s just way too much wrong for my liking. But, even that is not somehow not putting me off.

But, what I’d prefer really is a nice alternative in the same way my Rio Karma was to iPod ubiquity. I’d take the interface and the screen but swap Safari for Firefox, bump up the storage space, add a hard drive and naturally add the ability to play all my .ogg files. I guess it should probably run on Linux too, but I’m not that geeky. Similarly, no need to bother with the ability to use Songbird to download the music playing in your local free-trade organic co-operative workers’ collective cafe (as that will probably be shit too). A pipe dream? Maybe…but a step in the right direction: Mozilla recently announced that Firefox is going mobile (properly this time). Of course, I’m not sure I can wait that long…

Lastly, I love RSS and I love Google Reader. Although it’s got nothing on Netvibes design-wise, Google Reader’s functionality wins out (although it won’t do feeds that require authentication, so for instance, I can’t get my Gmail in Reader, whereas I could in Netvibes). But, RSS is still a “pull” technology. I’ve got to go to to Reader, sort through the stories (over 1000 unread at the moment) and then decide which ones to read. As I’m so desperately busy, well, lazy, I’d like to be able to get email alerts on specified search terms from my feeds to help me decide what I need to read. Google Reader doesn’t let you do this, and Google Alerts doesn’t seem to let you either, unless I’m missing something, which as always is very possible. I’m thinking of writing a Zope/Plone-based solution to do this which would be fun and educational, but I can’t believe there is isn’t an obvious way to do this in the available products– please let me know if you know of one.