Tag: flock

Browsers, os x, Vista

Screaming fast browser II

I wrote a post the other day giving speeds of various browsers running the SunSpider JavaScript Benchnark tests.

Since writing the post Firefox has released Firefox 3.0b3 and Robert made me aware in the comments of the previous browser speed post that Opera 9.5 beta was released so I decided to check those two browsers as well.

on Vista the performance times came in at:

Opera 9.5b – 16,293.6ms

Firefox 3.0b3 – 19,345.4ms

WebKit r30123 – 8,920.2ms

While on OS X:

Firefox 3.0b3 – 9,822.4ms

Opera 9.5b – 8,953.6ms

WebKit r30123 – 5,744.8ms

So while the Opera 9.5b browser is the second fastest browser tested and is showing very respectable times, it is still taking nearlt twice as long as the Safari Webkit browser to render pages.

Note, I re-tested the WebKit so that the results of these browsers would be directly comparable. It is also worth noting that Firefox 3.0b3 is significantly faster on Vista than was Firefox 3.0b2 while on OS X Firefox 3.0b3 is only marginally faster than Firefox 3.0b2.

Browsers, iPod

Screaming fast browser?

After reading Seth Weintraub’s post on how the upcoming versions of Safari are blisteringly fast I decided to download the latest nightly (WebKit r30123) and check it out for myself.

To check the different browser versions I used the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark.

The results were pretty amazing – on Vista the performance times came in at:

Internet Explorer 7 -   66,870.6ms

Firefox 2.0.0.12 -       34,121.0ms

Firefox 3.0b2 –           29,293.6ms

Safari 3.04 -               21,930.4ms

WebKit r30123 -          9,094.2ms

While on OS X:

Flock 1.08 -               30,476.8ms

Firefox 3.0b2 –           10,863.4ms

Safari 3.04 -               13,534.0ms

WebKit r30123 -          5,720.0ms

That’s pretty spectacular performance – and seeing as I use Safari quite a bit on my iPod Touch, I may just have to switch default browsers for a while to see how I get on with Safari Webkit!

UPDATE – post updated with results for Firefox 3.0b2 on Vista

Technology

Richard MacManus' predictions for 2007

Richard MacManus, over on Read/WriteWeb has an extremely comprehensive must read post on his forecast for what will be hot in 2007.

His predictions for 2007:
RSS will go mainstream
Structured data will be a big trend
Widgets will continue rising in 2007
Web Office will continue to ramp up
The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT
Rich Internet Apps will be a major force
Google in particular will continue to push the boundaries of browser-based apps
Semantic Web products will come of age
Expect more big things from Amazon
Expect some shakeups in the online advertising market
Watch out for developments in 2007 along the lines of a better, more robust online ad model
2007 will be about Search 2.0 and the rise of the vertical search engines
Microsoft’s Windows Live services will gain real momentum next year
Google may come out with some form of GoogleOS
Open Source Desktops will continue to gain momentum in ’07
Expect the competition between IE7 and FireFox (plus Flock, Opera and Maxthon) to be intense
Expect Safari compatibility to rise sharply in 2007
Internet-based TV will ramp up in 2007
2007 will undoubtedly be a good year for P2P
SecondLife will become an important platform for marketing, promotion, and of course social networking
Virtual Money: Paypal showed the way, and we’re seeing more of it now – SecondLife LindeX, Microsoft points etc.
The online real estate market will grow rapidly in ’07
The search for disruptive business models will continue!
Social networks will probably also become more open – and data portability will start to occur
International Web will finally start to get its due in mainstream media
One Laptop Per Child will create good buzz and may increase the adoption of thin-client like computers
Broadband continues to grow
VoIP space will really hot up
Mobile Web may be the big story of 2007
Mobile will be a bigger development and advertising platform in ’07
watch for an emerging Webphone market – for example Apple’s rumored iPhone and a GooglePhone.

Check out Richard’s post for an explanation of each of these predictions.

Blogging, office 2.0, Photo Sharing, Podcast, PodLeaders, RSS, Web, Web 2.0

Your top Web 2.0 apps?

If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?

I use:

  1. my blog and podcast software all the time (they are run out of WordPress)
  2. my Flickr account regularly to post photos
  3. Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets frequently for collaboration or sharing of documents
  4. Google’s Calendar to synch with my laptop and mobile phone calendars
  5. Technorati, PubSub and Google’s Blogsearch to subscribe to RSS searches
  6. Flock as my main browser of choice (primarily because of the Flickr and Del.icio.us integration) – I also use Firefox, Camino, Safari and IE7
  7. Feedburner to burn and track my feeds
  8. NetNewsWire, Google Reader and iTunes to consume my feed list
  9. TechMeme, Megite and TailRank for keeping up with tech news
  10. Del.icio.us very occasionally to store URLs for items I have found interesting

What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?

Photo Sharing, Technology

JUploadr – free photo uploading app

Previously I wrote about how easy uploading photos to Flickr is using Flock.

Since then Thomas Hawk turned me on to Steve Cohen’s cross-platform, open source photo uploader JUploadr.

Why do I like it?

  • Well, it is GPL’d for a start.
  • Cross-platform
  • It allows me to upload photos to my accounts on Flickr and Zooomr
  • It allows batch editing and uploading
  • I can tag my pictures and
  • I can upload directly into my Flickr Sets

Why JUploadr isn’t on Flickr’s Tools page is beyond me. It beats the tools there and it is free (unlike the iPhoto plugin linked to there).

Browsers

Flock browser review

I have been using Flock since it was first released last year and I have been impressed at its progress (if a little frustrated at it’s rate of progress!).

I like the seamless implementation of social media like Del.icio.us and Flickr into Flock. In fact, it was Flock which got me into using Del.icio.us. Flock was even my default browser for a while (at any one time I have Flock, Safari, Firefox and Camino running simultaneously). I stopped using Flock as my default browser however, because of its patchy support for the minimum set of extensions I want to use (SessionSaver, FlashBlock and AdBlock).

The latest version of Flock launched last week and I thought I’d give it a whirl. I heard the developers discussing the photo uploader on the TalkCrunch podcast and it sounded interesting so I have been playing with that particularly (see screenshot below).

Flock image uploader

The Flock photo uploader is fantastic! There’s no other word for it. It is simplicity itself – drag an image to the photo topbar and the uploader opens ready to upload the image.

I was previously using a plugin for iPhoto to upload my images to my Flickr account but it was very clunky. It frequently hung in the middle of image uploading and there was no way to associate photos with a Flickr set. That had to be done manually after uploading. This is all a thing of the past thanks to the Flock uploader.

As well as uploading to Flickr the Flock uploader allows you to upload to PhotoBucket. Now if only they’d implement uploading to Zooomr, I’d be able to upload to my Zoomr account from within Flock as well!

Technology

Is there something in the air?

Om Malik announced today he is leaving his job at Business 2.0 to setup a new business.

Robert Scoble let slip that he is leaving Microsoft to join a startup, at a bloggers dinner the other night.

Tara Hunt announced last week that she’s leaving Riya to go out on her own.

Ben Metcalf has left the BBC to start something new.

Chris Messina posted a couple of months back that he was leaving Flock to go out on his own.

I’m sure there are others I have left out.

Of course no trend would be complete without its exception – Niall Kennedy announced he was leaving startup Technorati back in February and subsequently joined Microsoft!

It seems that all over good people are on the move, primarily from (reasonably) secure jobs into the great unknown that is startupsville! Is there something in the air?

Browsers

Cool new Firefox plug-in

Hyperwords was released yesterday and it is a very cool extension for Firefox and Flock. It has been developed by Liquid-Information an interesting company with an advisory board that reads like a who’s who in IT (Doug Engelbart, Vint Cerf, Ted Nelson, Bruce Horn, Dave Farber, Joi Ito, etc.

What does it do? Well, the default behaviour is that, when you select text in your browser, a drop-down menu appears, giving you instantly available options of what to do with the text –
Hyperwords drop-down menu

This is quite cool and allows quick and easy access to functionality you might otherwise have to go to other pages to get. The Preferences settings for the plug-in allows you to select whether the data you select opens in a new tab, or a new page, in the foreground or background. Also, all the menu options are available from the keyboard – so for the example above, I can simply type s s g and a Google Search for the highlighted term will open in a new tab (in the background in my case)!

It is also possible to turn off the menu (operate in invisible mode) and still have access to the keyboard options.

Two minor gripes I have with the extension are:

  1. The blog this with option only goes to Blogger and WordPress.com – it needs to allow blogging to other blog platforms like WordPress, Typepad etc.
  2. The drop-down menu doesn’t give a View Selection Source option – I sometimes like to view the source of a small portion of a page. In Firefox, I select that portion, right-click and select View Selection Source – this should also be possible in Hyperwords

Other than that I think this is a great plug-in.

The CEO of Hyperwords is called Frode Hegland (Frode is pronounced to rhyme with road). I interviewed Frode about this new extension and will publish that interview on PodLeaders.com as a podcast tomorrow. Frode gave me some fascinating insights into how he came up with Hyperwords and how he landed such an amazing Advisory Board!

Browsers, Search Engines

Yahoo! purchase of Del.icio.us confirmed – who is flocking next?

Well, the post I made last night about the Yahoo! Del.icio.us rumours was confirmed this evening when Del.icio.us made the announcement of the takeover on its blog and Yahoo! posted the news also.

All day today I was doubting my source ‘cos no-one else picked up the story but, no, it came good. It is a great feeling to scoop a story like this by about 24 hours ahead of everyone else on the Internet.

Michael Arrington and others are following up on the story now.

The real question is who does Yahoo! have in its sights next? Who would it make sense for them to acquire now that they have bought Flickr and Del.icio.us? If only there were some application which tied these two together… a browser even… pity I can’t think of any 😉