Err, sorry for that childish breakdown of purposeful misspellings, lolcat-esque grammar and misuse of capital letters, I just got a bit excited. This thing is 10000% better than Wordpress 2, and I mean it. I loved Wordpress 2 from the minute I started using it, but, sort of in the same way I love VectorDesigner, it bugged me in a lot of small-ish ways. The Wysiwyg editor messed with my posts, plugins had to be manually updated, the dashboard was almost entirely useless, and the interface would quickly become cluttered with the multitude of space-hogging plugins. Wordpress 2.5 fixes EVERYTHING that I hated about Wordpress 2, and then ads on top of it with some amazing features that I never knew I needed until now.

The new feature that I really like is the easy picture uploader, and inserter. You can use it for individual pictures or you can easily make really cool gallery pages and stuff (which I will demo later on). I think wordpress 2 had something like this, but it wasn’t anywhere near as smooth. This uses a lightbox style effect to put all of the dialogs and stuff into a neat and clean window. There are similar dialogs for video, audio, and other media (like embedded flash I presume). Lemme tell ya, these dialogs will save me SOOO much time I now don’t know what I would ever do without them, and this is the first post I’ve written in 2.5! So maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but they’re great, I can do more with my blog now that inserting stuff is seamless. I do have a few disappointments, for example you can’t grab a youtube link and have wordpress auto-insert the player for you (which would be really nice), but other than that it’s just really neat.

There are also a lot of little things that add to the overall experience of wordpress. The interface is much brighter, neater, and cleaner. Lists are better laid out and easier to read (like the Page Manager, pictured left), Tags auto-complete, categories sort by most used, little things like that. There are also some little new features that can add some more customizability to your blog, like the ability to edit the permalink of the post (notice the permalink for this post doesn’t have the FULL name of the post in it, to keep the URL short). Everything is much better laid out, and in general just looks better. I must say though, I was a bit shocked when I first logged into my new Wordpress, it is REALLY different from 2.0 in visual style, and things are laid out a bit differently, so there might be a tiny bit of a learning curve.

It’s not absolutely perfect though, it still has some (major) bugs, like, oh, not being able to add images when using Safari, but I’m sure they’ll get those sorted out. Overall: TOTALLY FRICKEN AMAZING! 463.58 Million thumbs up. Now, to demo the spiffy gallery feature:

This Week: DrawIt

This weeks download is a great program I just found out about called DrawIt. It’s sort of vector drawing meets bitmap drawing. You can do all sorts of bitmap-ish stuff like glows, shadows, complex gradients, masks, filters, etc. Yet it’s non destructive, completely re-editable, shape based, with perfect curves (how odd does that sound?) and small save-file sizes. The one characteristic of vector drawing that it’s missing is the infinite-zoomability, for some reason it still insists on a set number of pixels. All of the bitmap-ish effects are applied via automator-looking filters. It’s all very mac looking, beautifully laid out interface, drag and drop everything, very elegant, yet powerful.

-Trial Type: Watermarked export, No time limit (?)
-Price: $42 (The meaning of the universe!)
-Link: http://getdrawit.com/

Blogged with Flock

10. Quartz Composer (Mac, Free)

Mac OS X has had the Quartz framework for a long time. In some ways it is very simmilar to Leopard’s Core Animation. It allows developers to add animations into their software. Programs like iMovie (’06 version, for themes), PulpMotion, and Photo Presenter use this technology. Using Quartz Composer (Which comes with every mac as part of Xcode) you can easily make interactive, real time animations fed by data as opposed to keyframes. You can make Mac Screensavers, modify or create iMovie themes, extend programs like PulpMotion, or just make a cool looking animation. Well worth trying if you’re on a mac, especially since it’s free.

9. TivoCast (TiVo, Free with Tivo subscription)

Tivo’s been doing some cool stuff with the ability to network Series 2 and 3 DVR’s. You can dowload shows from your TiVo onto your computer, you can schedule shows from your machine, and, biggest of all IMO, you can watch video podcasts. Unfortunately, mostly because of TiVo’s odd encryption, very few shows support it. With TivoCast, shows like ‘DL.TV’ and ‘CNET’s tips for digital living’ end up right in your now playing list. I’ll take that the couch over my desk chair any day. I think TiVo is to blame for the not-very-wide adoption of this, they seem to only be giving their encoding technologies to a small group of testers, not quite ready to open the floodgates of Vodcasts on the TV, but if it gets big, the line between big networks and small sites will be blurred even more.

8. GarageBand (Mac, $79-$99)

I know I know, again with the mac stuff, but I think garageband deserves to be here not because nobody knows about it, that’s certainly not true, but because it’s being used as a ‘toy’ more than an actual tool. It is great for making music and podcasts, and I don’t know why more indie bands and podcasters don’t use it. The pro’s probably have reasons to use other software like Logic, but I really can’t think of much that GarageBand really lacks (although i’m definetly not an audio engineer). It’s a great toy, but I think it can be more.

7. Miro (Win/Mac/Lin, Open Source)

Video podcasts are the future of entertainment. Getting good shows whenever for free is just awesome. iTunes does a pretty good job of aggregating, downloading, and organizing them, but when you want some more features and power (or you wanna use it on Linux), Miro is the way to go. It has a very large iTunes style ‘Guide’ to many video podcasts. It uses torrent technology so you can actually download HD video podcasts, which is more than you can say for like, umm, my TV. There is a great color-coding system so you can easily see what’s unwatched, what’s downloading, and what has yet to be downloaded. It even has a built in iSquint kinda thing going on, you can download videos from 6 different sites including YouTube and Google Video. Unfortunately there’s no iPod syncing and no Front Row style interface thingy, but that’s not a deal-breaker for me. When I can’t watch something on the TiVo, Miro’s got it.

6. Multimedia Fusion (Win, $100)

As crazy as this sounds, i’m actually gonna go ahead and mention a windows-only app (It kinda works in WINE, not all that great though). Multimedia Fusion is a program that allows you to make 2D games and applications with absolutely no coding. It’s so easy to use, I had it down when I was 8 (Not to brag … or insult people who can’t figure it out). It’s a lot of fun to use, and there is a relatively large community of people to help you out with it. Plus, it’s an easy way to learn some simple concepts used in real coding (if’s, and’s, functions, etc). If you’ve got windows, switch to mac, buy parallels, and run this.

5. Mogulus (Web, Free)

Hey, who says websites aren’t tech products? This Adobe Flex based app is amazingly powerful, plus it’s ad based, so it’s free. Mogulus allows you to stream your own live TV channel over the web. You can not only stream your web cam like with Ustream, you can mix it together with other peoples cams, youtube videos, and titles. I think they may be coming a little too late, but it’s a really cool site and I hope it goes somewhere. It’s currently in private beta and I can definetly tell why, it’s not feature complete at all, and the servers constantly get overloaded. It’s got great potential and I think it should be getting more hype than it has.

4. EffectsLab (Win/Mac, $100-$150)

I’ve always wanted to make special effects in movies, but, y’know, Motion runs at $1300 plus the cost of a mac that’ll run it, that’s way out of my range. Luckily for me I stumbled upon these guys. Their stuff isn’t as powerful as Motion, no, but it’s a LOT cheaper and can do quite a bit of VFX stuff. Not quite professionall, but it’s easy to use and get’s some pretty good results. You can do particle systems, muzzle flashes, lots of optics stuff, color grading (kinda like the new Apple Color), and image filters. There are also other programs they make where you can do Green Screen and stuff. Over all, a little slow, but cheap and easy.

3. Adobe Flex Builder (Mac/Win, $500-$700)

People who follow me on twitter will probably be sick of me talking about this, but I think it should be in this list. While it is easily the most expensive thing here, I think it’s worth it. It is an IDE for Flash web apps, Flash Builder is made for animation, with some interactivity thrown in, Flex Builder is made for apps. Examples of sites include TweetAhead, Mogulus, ScrapBlog, and much more (Bigger list here). It’s based on the eclipse IDE, so it features Drag and Drop layout, Code Hints, Autocomplete, Property setting, and all that good stuff. It’s really easy to use and really powerful. It’s expensive, but with a student discount you can get it for as low as $80, plus there is a free trial version.

2. Blender 3D (Mac/Win/Lin/Solaris/BSD/Iris(?), Open Source)

Oh look, another program that my followers are probably sick of hearing about! Blender is an open source 3D modeler. It’s got a weird, kinda crazy interface. It’s hard to get used to, but is actually really really intuitive. Not really noobie freindly, no, but really quite powerful. There aren’t really any amazing features that nobody else has, although it does pack the power of quite a few professional programs into one. It’s got a modeler, a complete game coding system, a nodal compositor, a movie editor, and an audio editor. Granted most of the tools that arent modeling are a little weak. I make my theme songs in it, and a lot of other people have done some really good looking things.

1. Linux (OS, Open Source)

I know you were all hoping for the amazing killer app that NOBODY has ever heard of that washes your dishes, does your homework, and buys you sodas, but no, this one is old news to nerds. I put linux at number one because I think it’s still a nerdy kinda thing, but will soon emerge as a household term. Ubuntu is, I think, easier to use than Windows. It’s finally ready for the big time, it’s finally ready to be on the old junker machines and the new ‘eww, vista’ machines. Yes, linux is currently being under-used. It’s great because it’ll run just about anywhere, like on my 8 year old laptops. It’s very customizable and very stable. Most of these others are not very widely recognised even in the tech community, linux is in the next class, not widely recognaised in the mainstream.

So, there you have it, some of them maybe a little lame, I know, but I hope you all fond something new. I dunno how I run into all this niche stuff, but I do and I love it all.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Top, 10, Tech, Products

This new version of Flock not only appears to be more stable, plus, it looks better, and has some sweet new features. There’s a “Web Clipboard” so that you can essentially save parts of web pages and paste them elsewhere. Also, you can now do YouTube stuff through the Flickr bar thingy. I didn’t play around with any of the advanced features last time, so I can’t really tell what’s new, but I can tell that there have been lots of minor improvements here and there and the interface got really polished.

Ok, so i’m back to flock, I pressed the “Make flock your default browser” button. I can now display to the world that I Flock again! I’m gonna use it as a browser, a blogger, and maybe an rss reader (I gotta say I am not happy with Vienna, talk about ugly). Of course, the biggest advantage is that now instead of cleaning up Elephant poop on the Safari and Fox poop Fire, I now just have to clean up bird poop…

Update: My take on the interface! Very Shiny…

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, browser, web, it told me to tag it like that, (insider joke), you have to blog with flock to know

Democracy is kinda like a big expanded version of the iTunes video podcast section. They have a nice ’store’ type thing where everything it free featuring 1375 channels. Every vidcast I could think of was there. Revision 3’s got their stuff there, TWiT’s got their stuff there, RocketBoom is there, Screencasts Online’s there, lot’s of stuff. They advertise it as ‘Internet TV’ which really gets me drooling (’24′ on my computer, away from my parents constant “what are you watching? It looks violent. You shouldn’t be watching that stuff.”), but in reality it’s just video podcasts, although in the future they might be able to get some exclusive deals with major networks.

The interface is really mac-ish on the mac version, very clean and polished. Then, with the windows version, they kinda took that, messed up the colors and stomped on the buttons, so, naturally, it looks very windows like. Anyway, it’s very pretty on a mac, and it does offer less pretty versions for windows and many distributions of linux. Plus, being open source, you can do some modifying to say, make the other versions look like the mac version.

They are based in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is kinda cool ’cause thats about 20 minutes away from me. So, I can safety say that in this state, we have democracy … erm, Miro. Well that burst my bubble…

The games graphics are really good, I mean look at that picture, that’s not some fake, that’s real. You should see the water, complete with ripples, reflections, waves, even realistic lighting. The performance could be better, but maybe that was due to the 27 windows I had open at the time of testing. The gameplay is fun, although I have a feeling that it’ll get old pretty quickly.

Anyway, at fifty bucks USD it’s pretty pricey, but you can just do what I did and convince your little sibling to pay for it. Basically, if you got some money and you want to waste all of your waking hours for about a week or so, this’ll do that pretty darn well. Maybe microsoft should promote it’s game to, like, work on Windows…

technorati tags:Age, of, empires, III, Microsoft

Blogged with Flock

It makes it so easy to blog, not only am I gonna blog more, i’m gonna put more pictures and stuff in by dragging them from any page in the world, my flickr photos, or photos on my hard drive. I can save snippets from web pages, or just write my own stuff with their (shiny) wordpress style editor.

You can drag photos from any website to just about anywhere else including blog posts, see:
You can easily upload photos to your flickr/photo bucket account.

There are many extensions, including ones ported from firefox (Flock is BASED on firefox, the core is a bit different), and some unique to flock. They do have customizable themes, but their themes page is down/missing. The theme they package with it is, well, pretty good.

Anyway, i don’t know if I’ll keep using it, but it’s worth a try at http://www.flock.com.

technorati tags:Flock, Browsers, Software

Blogged with Flock

It has 25.6 bijillion and a half features, including easy SSH access! If you’re not a nerd, you don’t need to know what that means. It also has most of the transmit features build in for easy publishing. One of the most useful features to me is the collaboration, when AriX and I were coding TweetAhead, we kept writing over eachothers stuff. A Javascript debugger makes javascript a snap, as is made apparent by the coda website. It has 2 css editors, one is a CSSedit style visual editor, the other is a simple CSS code editor. It also supports PHP and who knowes what else. And it does this that and the other thing, and that, and it’s got this doohicky, and this dongle, and … y’know, it might be easier to list what it doesn’t do…

If that’s not enough, it comes with 4 free digital books! That deserves a paragraph of it’s own.

Now for the important part, the price. So, dreamweaver is $300 and it does about half of what this does. Is it $600? No, how about $300? No, $100? Usually, but if you buy it now it’s only $80. Wow, I sound like a salesman don’t I? Oh well, I have to say, as far as the free trial is concerned, i’m lovin’ it™.

Recently i’ve been getting a little frustrated with the time it takes to switch between windows. There’s Control+Tab, but that takes 2 whole buttons, then I have to scroll through all 17 Gajillion and 9 programs that I have open. There’s expóse, but then you have to find your window and click it. You could minimise everything and find it in the dock, but then you end up with a really long dock, and you still have to find the window you’re looking for.

What if I told you switching between windows could be as easy as clicking a tab thingy on the side of your screen? What if I threw in a beautiful UI with very maclike features? What if making windows into tabs could be as easy as dragging them to the side of the screen? Would you be interested? How much would you pay for such a thing? $500? $200? What if I told you that it were only $15, would you beleive me? Why doesn’t everybody go down to http://www.donelleschi.com/stickywindows/ for your FREE demo video of this amazing product? Why do I keep asking questions?

Ok, so, Sticky Windows is shareware software (for mac) that basically allows you to turn any window into tabs. You can show or hide the window just by clicking the tab. You can make the tabs automatic or manual. Automatic tabs close any other tabbed windows when you pern them, preventing desktop clutter, manual tabs do not do that. You can make a window into a tab by simply dragging it to the corner of the screen, you can un-tab it by dragging the tab off of the side. The program itself is in the form of a beautiful, maclike preference pane. The trial version pops up with a window every once in awhile asking you to buy it, after 5 seconds the window goes away. It’s anoying, but if paying for it involves getting my mom to enter her credit card number (after asking me 12 bijillion times if I really need it), it’s worth it. The full version is $15 USD.

Well, I like it, and I don’t even like quicksilver, so that is saying something. Apparently lot’s of other people agree with me too, because this got on the front page of Digg. Anyway, now i’m off to ponder what to tweet and what to blog as I go to sleep, I think this whole social networking thing is taking over my life. Does anybody know of a 12 step program, because man, I really do always need to be within 12 steps of a device that can post to twitter…