nonsmokingarea.com

as mike arrington announcend earlier, first public beta (v0.7) of firefox-based browser flock was released today. for it’s seamless integration of several webservices, flock is supposed to be the “web 2.0″-browser of choice:

• flock fetches images of flickr- and photobucket-accounts, and furthermore allows drag&drop of images into html-areas (f.e. comment-boxes on blogs, user-profiles)
• social-bookmark-services delicious and Shadows are fully integrated into the browser, replacing local bookmarks
• flock’s powerful cut&paste clipboard simplifies blogging with Blogger, MoveableType, Wordpress and other tools.
• RSS-reader included

agreed, most of these features are available as firefox-extensions in some way, but Flock stands out with it’s polished userinterface and is definitely worth a try for everyone using at least two of these webservices.

while members of the microsoft developer network (msdn) receive beta-DVDs since, hmm, how many years?, microsoft finally put their new operating system to public beta today. the 3gbyte-images can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/. and since you’re already clogging your broadband, why not get the office 2007 beta too? (having used an earlier beta on my laptop, I’m quite excited to see the progression…so I’ll probably spend a good part of my weekend with it ).

(news brought by scobleizer, of course)

besides going into beta with their spreadsheet-service, google yesterday also released a mac os-version of the google video player, a desktop-application allowing to watch downloaded movies from video.google.com. videoclips can be loaded from local disc as well as directly by clicking the “download”-button on video.google.com. however, the player cannot access clips which are not approved for download by their author. if you need to download such movies, you can still use greasemonkey and the user-scripts by Joshua Kinberg.

opera.com released version 2.0 of it’s portable mini-browser today… as a happy user of opera mini 1.x I couldn’t resist trying the new version. unfortunately, the installation-process via cellphone is not as convenient as it could be. I failed in trying to download the new 2.0-package with opera 1.x from http://mini.opera.com - the old app wasn’t able to download and execute/unpack the new .jar/.jad files (opera is a java application). as a backdoor I used the built-in nokia-browser, which worked ok.

• ability to download images, mp3’s and other media directly to the phone
• skinable themes
• advanced search functions against multiple search engines
• “speed dial” - quick bookmark access
• quick & smooth panning while browsing

although written in java, opera seems to render pages as fast as the native browser of my nokia 6630. web-pages are generally rendered quite good, however, frame-based designs, advanced css, javascript and flash are not supported.

just found a very cool wordpress-plugin:

Scrobbler is a Plugin for WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0 that displays your Last.fm-account’s recently played songs, or whatever AudioScrobbler web service you like, in your desired location on your WordPress blog, in your desired format using AJAXrefreshingâ„¢.

so in the sidebar of this page you can now see which music I’m listening to at the very moment…nice!

the plugin can be found here:

http://leflo.de/projekte/wordpress/scrobbler