Summersault Weblog

A friend recently noted that 4 of the 5 web-based applications he uses on a regular basis to manage his life are officially still in “beta” status. While I think this has become a fairly standard practice for many web application providers, I hope it’s one that we still treat with some healthy skepticism and concern.

At Summersault, when we develop software applications, beta is certainly one of the stages that the software goes through, but it’s not a stage we would ever turn the public loose on. Generally speaking, here are the stages of our software life-cycle:
Read the rest of this entry »

I recently found a neat little application that has been useful both at work and in my at-home computing. It is called Prism, and what it does is allow you to run your favorite web applications (Remember the Milk, Facebook, Google Calendar, etc.) as if they were desktop applications. Because it was built on the Firefox engine, it will run any web applications you can run in your Firefox browser.
Read the rest of this entry »

When Mac OS X Leopard was released in October 2007, there was significant outcry about a number of changes made to the built-in firewall. One security consultant even went so far as to call the firewall “a mess…so simple as to be nearly useless”. Apple soon released a few security updates that fixed a number of complaints about the firewall, but for me, a general sense of brokenness and distrust prevailed. Now we’ve upgraded some of our Macs in the office to Leopard, and recently my negative perception of the new firewall has changed.
Read the rest of this entry »

As I did with the release of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, I thought I would share a few notes about my experience in upgrading to the latest version of the Mac operating system, 10.5 “Leopard”.
If you just want to hear about all of the good stuff I’m experiencing as a result of the upgrade, you can skip to the bottom line.
Read the rest of this entry »

As an internet professional, I use e-mail constantly. Mutt, a popular e-mail client for command line geeks had been wearing on me. I found Thunderbird 1.5 a capable replacement for my needs, and have since cut the average size of my Inbox in half.

Here are five tips I use to get the most productivity out of Thunderbird.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a Linux user, I’m a fan of “Flash Video” for Video content delivery on the web, used most visibly now by Google Video.

Flash video depends only on the Flash plugin, which nearly everyone has, is well supported on Linux and seems to generally “just work”. There also seems to be a lot of flexibility to integrate the player with the design of a particular website, which is a nice feature for developers.

Finally, Flash video is nice for the smaller file sizes of the video format. For example, converting my AVI file to the FLV format reduced the file size by about 75%!

I was pleased to find that there are already free, open source tools that allow me to publish content in the FLV using Linux. (But I believe the same tools could also work on Mac and Windows and provide some pointers for those platforms at the bottom.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I downloaded and tried the view preview release of Flock, a new web browser based on Firefox.

I went into the experience cynical, having used many browsers in my experience as a professional website developer. What else could they possibly add that I would really want?

I found one feature in Flock that by itself makes it worth considering the browser.

Flock has built a better bookmark.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you already know about the world of website content syndication, RSS news feeds, feed reader/aggregator software, and all that jazz, you might wonder why I’m bothering to post Yet Another Article about it. I’ll just go ahead and say that I have purely evangelistic motives: I would love to see content syndication adopted more widely, both by end users, and by website content producers. So if this is old hat, you’re welcome to move along, not much to see here. If you’re wondering what website content syndication is and how it might make your life better, read on!
Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t all that long ago that Mozilla released the first public offering of Sunbird, a calendering companion to the popular Firefox web browser that I already use and prefer.

I paid no mind to the announcement at the time, as I was happy enough with KOrganizer for this purpose. Recently one bug drove me over the edge to seek alternatives. I was being asked to repeatedly click on an error message which wasn’t helpful enough to allow me to solve the problem, which I couldn’t confirm was a problem anyway. Very frustrating.

In just a few days of use, Sunbird seems so much better– it’s hard to imagine going back anytime soon.

Read the rest of this entry »

At work I happily run Mac OS X 10.2.8 and my main browser of choice is still Safari (version 1.0.3); it doesn’t really bother me that these are both a couple of years out-of-date since they remain in fine working condition. Sometimes, though, my crusty software does make me feel a little bit like a stick in the mud, what with Tiger coming out and Firefox catching on. But just the other day I discovered that, apparently, Google likes my software configuration quite a bit.
Read the rest of this entry »