http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog The weblog for Summersault, LLC, a website development firm in Richmond, Indiana Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:22:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2008/04/27/when-beta-really-means-beta.html 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. ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2008/02/29/bridging-the-gap-between-web-applications-and-desktop-applications-prism.html 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2008/02/05/changing-my-mind-about-leopards-much-maligned-firewall.html 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2007/12/16/notes-on-an-upgrade-to-mac-os-x-105-leopard.html 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2006/07/20/five-power-tips-for-thunderbird.html 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2006/02/13/publishing-flash-videos-with-free-open-source-tools.html 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2005/10/23/flock-building-a-better-bookmark.html 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2005/06/28/can-website-content-syndication-change-your-life-too.html 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2005/06/03/sunbird-vs-korganizer.html 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 ... http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2005/05/27/new-google-search-terms-in-coloronly-for-old-safari.html