Tag Archives: Macintosh

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Trying Out Flock (Again)

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flock-logo_thumb.png

I first gave Flock a try in the middle of last year. The mixture of a Firefox base, and out of the box support for a number of the social networking sites that I use regularly seemed quite attractive. Unfortunately although I liked what I saw, it didn’t really feel ready for the big time back then. It crashed quite a few times, and although the integration with sites like Flickr was fairly good, it wasn’t enough to get me to switch.

Over the intervening months I’ve continued to keep my copy updated, but in general Firefox has been my browser of choice, however on hearing about the release of version 1.0, and also reading some of the positive reaction, for example here and here, the time seemed right to give it another go, and I’ve been running it as my main browser for the past couple of days.

So far the impression has been pretty good. Whilst it is true that I could get a lot of the functionality into Firefox through extensions, here everything just works out of the box. There is a bit of initial setup, pointing the browser at all your various accounts, but in general that is just a question of going to the relevant web page and logging on. There is a nice sidebar that keeps track of when contacts on sites like Flickr upload pictures, and then if I want to see what has been added I can just click the media button and their photo stream appears across the top of the window. In amongst all of that, it’s just really stable, not a hiccup so far.

So what are the downsides? The biggest is if you’re making significant use of a site that’s not really supported. In my case that is Google Reader that I use for all my feed reading as it maintains a consistent state across any of the methods by which I read the feeds, be that iPod Touch, mobile phone, work PC or Mac at home. Whilst Flock apparently has a pretty good feed reader, I’m not using it – the feed functionality has been set to subscribe to feeds in Google Reader instead. To get me using the built in feed reader, it will really need to be able to operate as a front end to Google Reader to ensure that everything is kept in sync.

The other significant part of the application I haven’t used as yet is the blog editor, primarily because I’m quite happy using Ecto instead. Although I know I’m not using all of the features of that client, I’m perfectly happy using it to type blog postings, although I guess I may give the Flock client a go at some point in the future.

So should you be giving Flock a go? Certainly if you spend a lot of time on the social networking sites it is worth a look. Also if you’ve been having problems with Firefox you might have better luck with it as although it is based on Firefox code, it has diverged from that codebase in a couple of areas, so you may find you feel more comfortable with Flock rather than Firefox. I’ve currently got it set as my default browser, so we’ll see how things go with it over the next few days. If you fancy giving it a go, the install can be downloaded from www.flock.com.

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology, PocketPC, Psion, Symbian

Stephen Fry – Devices and Desires

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I blogged a couple of years ago about an article about Stephen Fry that appeared in Mac Format and about his addiction to the Mac platform stretching back twenty years.

Recently Stephen has started a blog and the topic of his first posting – Devices and Desires – which discusses another technological addiction, mobile devices and Smartphones. Not surprisingly he has an iPhone, but this looks at the competition, most of which he has tried.

Style wise this is a bit different from your usual technical article – very Stephen Fry (so it does have a couple of more adult comments) – but it is a great read, and pretty funny in places. Incidentally as an example of the quirkiness, the title of the article is taken from the General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer (“I have followed too much the devices and desires of my own heartâ€?)- not a common point of reference for a computer article, but somewhat appropriate!

Looking at his history, it seems he is a Psion 3 fan whereas I only came in when the Psion 5 was launched. He’s tried Palm devices, but is very frustrated with the way they seem to regularly try to commit corporate suicide. He is particularly damning about the Palm Foleo, a mobile device even he did not want.

As an aside he also mentioned Markspace Missing Sync as a good way to synchronise a PocketPC with a Mac – not surprisingly after my nightmare with the product I can’t agree. Despite it’s numerous updates over recent months, I’m still not sure I actually trust it not to scramble my diary!

According to the article, he has tried a number of Symbian smartphones, and has some harsh words for Sony Ericsson:

What a crushing, lowering, fury-inducing disappointment. Just how dumb are the software engineers, designers and marketeers at Sony E?

On the other hand, he seems to quite like the latest Nokia offerings.

Moving on to the iPhone, he has many of the same criticisms as other techies and industry commentators – but again like quite a few in the US he is using the phone anyway.

What is quite impressive is that for a blog with only one article, Stephen Fry has so far had 140 comments – hopefully that will persuade him to write more as I for one will certainly be reading.

Computers/Technology, Pictures

Automatic Updates

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When I came to upload the picture for the previous post, I did the same thing I always do, and took the memory card from the phone, and plugged it into the Mac. Now what usually happens is that the usually reliable iPhoto detects the card, and offers to import the pictures, but detects that the hundred and twenty or so pictures on the phone that I have previously imported, are already in my library, and offers to skip them.

This time, everything worked as before, except that iPhoto totally failed to identify that there were duplicates.

Searching on Google, I could find people who had a similar problem, but as a result of the most recent iPhoto update – something that I put on back in September – and I’ve imported a load of pictures since then without problems. The only possible change I could find is the OS 10.4.3 update that was installed automatically last weekend, however the only mention of iPhoto in the change details was to do with Spotlight and iPhoto – nothing about importing pictures.

Anyway, I’m sure the problem will be fixed in the next update, and until then, I’m using the slightly more involved Image Capture application that also comes with MacOS X, to ensure I only import what I need to.

Computers/Technology

Scoble Feeds The Conspiracy Theorists

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Reading through the new postings to Robert Scoble‘s blog, the Scobleizer, I came across a posting that as a Mac user I found pretty funny.

The posting is on the subject of a video of the recent Longhorn RSS announcement, however due to limited bandwidth, rather than posting two versions, he had only posted a Windows Media streaming file. This had caused problems for Mac users because the Mac version always shows the lowest bandwidth stream in the file rather than the largest. To his credit he is now chasing up the relevant team at Microsoft to sort out the problem.

The reason I found the whole thing funny is that most Mac users try to avoid dealing with the Mac Windows Media Player because of the generally poor performance. Also quite apart from the performance, even the latest version won’t run all the videos that the Windows version displays, and streaming video to it is just a waste of time.

Whilst I’m not convinced, many Mac Zealots will have you believe that Microsoft deliberately put out a poorly performing version for the Mac to give the impression of cross platform support to encourage people to use the format, but then to argue that to get good performance you really need a Windows machine, as the Mac can’t cut it. Whilst there may be a myriad of reasons as to why the bug wasn’t spotted sooner, the admission on Scobleizer can only add fuel to the conspiracy theorists!