Photo-sharing site Zooomr re-launched its site with a new version (2.0) in the last couple of days.
Zooomr screen shot
Hosted on
Zooomr
The launch of the new version of the site was delayed by a DOS attack on the servers but Zooomr seem to have put that behind them quite successfully now. The main differences I see in this version of the site are a re-write of the Geotagging process which makes geotagging your photos even easier through Zooomr.
I haven’t tried the Zooomrtations (audio annotating of photos) so I can’t say if this has changed in any way in this release. Very little else has changed radically with version 2.0 (that I can see). In terms of photo sharing I still prefer Flickr’s ability to share your photos with groups. Still the Geotagging in Zooomr is kinda cool and Zooomr are offering pro accounts to bloggers for the moment so you may want to try it out.
In case you missed it, Dell started a blog in the last couple of weeks. So what? Well, Dell has been roundly panned on the Internet for around 12 months now for not being responsive to criticism, for not listening. The term “Dell Hell” came to be coined referring to Dell’s poor customer service. Dell’s share price dropped.
Obviously people in Dell started to take notice!
The new Dell blog started quietly with a post on a Dell gaming machine (the XPS 700) - no fanfare, no press releases, just this seemingly innocuous post.
There followed a couple of more posts on Dell’s blog before the blogosphere noticed. Several prominent bloggers on spotting the blog hammered it for not linking to other blogs:
It’s a blog in content management system name only. The subtitle is “direct conversations with Dell� but this is as much a conversation as yelling at a brick wall. There is not one link there. It’s filled with promotions for Dell’s wonderfulness.
and Steve Rubel said:
They could use the blog to engage the community in a genuine conversation on the critical issues that have dogged them for years now as well as the good things they are doing
Kudos to Dell though. They demonstrated that they are listening by linking to posts critical of them, by implementing many of the suggestions made to them by the blogosphere and by publishing even the most critical (non-profane) comments made on their blog:
What the heck is this drivel? This has to be the worst attempt at a corporate blog I’ve seen in a while, it provides no information, no value and is in no way entertaining or compelling. No comments from M. Dell, no comments on things that are going on etc.
Worthless….
Dell still have a few things to iron out in their blog (permalinks for comments would be nice, as would a relevant category listing on each post and a link to this blog would be cool too!) but if they continue to be as responsive as they have been, they are in serious danger of turning their poor reputation around.
I wrote a speculative post last September saying that laptops with flash drives instead of hard disk would ship in 2006.
According to an article in Gearlog, Asus has just started shipping a flash based laptop!
It is still very expensive
The disk alone is being sold at DVnation for a painful $1199, which is half the value of the notebook(ouch)
and only has one 16gb flash disk, but it is the beginning. My first computer had a 40mb hard drive and 1mb of ram - who measures in megabytes these days?
Advances in flash storage are happening fast - expect flash based laptops to be a viable alternative in under five years.
Skype is a cool little application. It allows you to make calls over the Internet for free to other Skype users and very cheaply to phones. Recent versions have included the ability to Skypecast (Skype with up to 100 people) and to video conference.
One of the major issues with Skype has always been that because it is a peer-to-peer program it can cause problems on networks - especially if it becomes a Supernode. Another issue with Skype is that it uses a proprietary protocol for its voip connections (as opposed to using an open protocol like SIP), thus no other programs can interact with and connect to Skype.
Now however, news is emerging from Asia that the Skype protocol has been hacked. Seemingly a Chinese company has hacked the protocol and are promising to come out with an application before the end of August which can connect to Skype and allow users to turn off Supernoding!
As Mike Arrington and Alec Saunders said:
But what they [Skype] should do is use this as an opportunity to open up the protocol and allow third party developers to build Skype compatible applications (under Skype’s terms).
What are the chances?
Mozilla announced yesterday the release of the latest beta version of Firefox - Firefox 2 Beta 1.
I downloaded a copy to try it out. As always on the Mac, install was the extremely straightforward drag and drop.
On launching, Firefox checked my extensions and disabled almost all of them (except Adblock - phew!). It then checked for updates to my extensions (found none) and promptly crashed!
Not very confidence inspiring.
I launched it again and this time it stayed running!
According to the launch notes, this version of Firefox 2 Beta 1 is supposed to have:
- Built in Phishing Protection
- Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
- Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
- Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
- Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
- Inline spell checking in text boxes
- Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
- New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
- Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
- New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
- New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
- Support for JavaScript 1.7
- Support for client-side session and persistent storage
- Extended search plugin format
- Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
- Support for SVG text using svg:textPath
Amongst my favourite features in this list are the the ability to re-open an accidentally closed tab and the built-in spell check. The ability to re-open tabs is accessible by right-clicking on any tab or by choosing the Recently Closed Tabs command under the History menu.
The built-in spell check means I now have no excuse for all the mis-spellings in my blog posts!
As well as checking words, you can add words to the dictionary so they won’t be flagged as mis-spellings in future and in time it will be possible to change the language away from the default US-English. If you attempt to change languages currently it tells you that this command hasn’t been hooked up yet but that alternative dictionaries can be downloaded from the Thunderbird Localised Dictionaries site. While these dictionaries can indeed be downloaded, they are not available for selection after being installed, even after a re-start. More work needs to be done here I think.
Overall, the beta version seems to perform quite well despite the few glitches mentioned above. It even seems marginally faster than Firefox 1.5 but this could simply be because most of the extensions are disabled!
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