Between the Spaces

If you play Second Life, this should make you happy. Due to the results of a recent poll done by Second Life, development on a new feature is now underway that would allow scripters to embed web-browsing through Mozilla’s browser, Firefox in Second Life! This has an endless amount of possibilities including placing a specific web site’s current state on the face of an object in game, allowing users to browse the site without ever leaving the Second Life interface.

A friend of mine recently showed me some exciting things that already being done with Second life and it’s interface to the Web as it is now. I might just start following Second Life news… it seems as though it is starting to go into some places of great interest to me.

I love when awesome projects get some time in the spotlight or at least are recognized.

Today, I found a link on lifehacker.com referring to an article on extremetech.com addressing the problem of music becoming boring or stagnant. I’ve been a huge fan of Pandora.com and Digitally Imported.com (or di.fm) for years now. I had heard of last.fm but had not really done much looking into it until recently.

I highly recommend that you check these out, especially Pandora. It is by far my favorite source of new music. In the mean time, go read the article at extremetech.

I have been using this wonderful service called Meebo for about 6 months or so now. It basically is a web version of Trillian with no IRC feature. Once can connect to AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ and now Google’s chat service - Google Talk.

Alike many other services on the web, Meebo’s front page have an enslaught of different languages to choose from in case the visitor does not speak English as their primary language. Awesome - catering to the world. Works for me.

A closer look (why I looked closer, I could not tell you - it’s actually a rather busy day today - maybe I’m just in analytical mode) proved to be well worth my time. One of the languages presented in the list was simply labled “l337“. Oh yes… it’s exactly what you think.

My interface now shows things such as “5CЯ33ll ll4[V]3” instead of “screen name” and “#31l*” instead of “help“. Props, kudos, whatever you want to call it, to Meebo for being so creative in their efforts to stay profession-looking but still have a personality which is completely essential in the business of web applications these days. I applaud you sirs.

Finally!

Google has released their AJAX-based calendar service. So far, after using it for about an hour or so, I’m pretty impressed. Very close to 30boxes in it’s approach, one can add a new event using Google’s “Quick Add” feature by typing an event’s details into a single text field. For instance typing “Birthday party Saturday 7pm” will add an event called “Birthday party” with the date and time as “April 15″ (from today’s date) and “7:00pm” respectively.

I’m sure there are many more tricks using the “Quick Add” feature that I have yet to discover. If one is currently using another calendar application for their daily calendaring, that’s no problem! … Assuming that your calendar application has an export feature. If not, well … happy transferring.

The ability to interact with other Google Calendar users has most certainly impressed me. The contacts list in the calendar is the same from Gmail, so very little work needed to invite people to events! I suppose that was the goal, eh? Everything else seems to be quite intuitive to say the least. As an example, another method of adding a new event, aside from the Quick Add feature, would be from within the day view, dragging one’s mouse from the start of an appointment to the end of it. One is then prompted to enter the name of the event and well, that’s about it. Of course you could then go into the appointment in order to modify it further, but that’s pretty darned convenient!

I think this product could easily compete with Microsoft’s Outlook and Mozilla’s Thunderbird regarding their calendar services.

Now to the other stuff which probably urged you to read this article: the bad stuff. Unfortunately, Google Calendar is not without it’s flaws. The good news? Google has repeatedly proven its ability to resolve blatant issues fast! So what’s wrong? Well, there are a few problems right up front. I tried to modify my existing calendar as well as add a few more (one for business, one for personal, etc) but after adding it, nothing had changed in the list of calendars!! That’s not what I was wanting… That’s AJAX for you. Nevertheless, if one refreshes the page via the browser, the calendars seem to appear right away. Other problems consist of things that are also easily rectified (at least temporarily) by refreshing the browser window. Overall, they are problems we can easily live with.

I say give it a shot! What’s the worst that can happen? You put a few appointments in it that you also keep track of by your normal means, decide you don’t like it and go back to the old method, which never changed! Give it a try, let us know what you think. Need a Gmail account in order to access this service? I’ve got plenty; just leave a comment with the request.

Google released a new product on February 23rd, 2006 called Google Pages. This new service allows even the worst of the Internet-declined of us to create a good-looking web page. Yes, it’s just as it sounds, the service does what a heck of a lot of other services have done in the past including AOL’sGeocities, and Lycos’ Angelfire as well as a few others. Even MSN got in on this market with MSN Spaces, giving users less control over the way the page looks than the others - nevertheless an interesting service.

If you’re interested in what the services actually look like when in use, I created a few pages to give you an idea so you don’t have to:

• MSN Spaces
• Google Pages

A few points on each of these… MSN Spaces seems to be more like a personal portal whereas Google Pages is more a Web page generator intended for creating pages which will be viewable by anyone. This is not to say that one is not able to display information to visitors as a normal Web page using MSN Spaces. In fact, once has the ability to set the permissions for the created MSN Space, granting either Private (Only the people you select can see your space), Messenger (only your MSN Messenger contacts can see your space) or Public (anyone on the Internet can see your space) access.

Google Pages does have it’s share of bugs, reminding me of Microsoft Frontpage’s shortcomings. Being a coder, I could not help but to stray into the “Edit HTML” section a time or two. An example was the side bar used for navigation. Changing this originally p (paragraph) tagged set of links into an ul (unordered list) for better CSS control.

My lovely code started out as a simple list, intentions for the li tags.

When saved and reaccessed, the HTML code was missing an entire caridge return between the first ul and li (which were now on the same line) and other random variations including a fresh font tag set with a blank space in it specifying size=”4″.  I had not even changed anything in the WYSIWYG mode!! It just made some changes needlessly! I suppose there is a flaw with ever editor like this, but that seems to just be moving backwards.

I think that if you’re interested in making Google Pages your home page editor, you might want to make sure that it will only be for non-professional purposes - at least for now.

For anyone out there who likes playing console games online, but hates to pay for the use of the console manufacturer’s servers, this might just be the thing for you!

I just came across a very interesting website, Nullriver Software, which had a application available for download called Amaryllis. This allows anyone with a game system physically capable of online play to play games online using the Amaryllis server. No, you cannot play with people on Xbox Live and the others as they are entirely different servers, but this is pretty darned neat!

I don’t have the ability to test this, so if someone does, please let me know how it works out.

For years Microsoft has developed and delivered quality products for a not so quality price. Due to the pricing, many have resorted to software piracy in order to obtain this software. This obviously is a lot of money out of Microsoft’s pocket. Other companies have since released their own office suites including word-processing and spreadsheet software for either a lot less money than Microsoft’s Office or in some cases, completely free!

Today, Google has already begun taking advantage of its relationship with Sun Microsystems by announcing its plans to compete with Microsoft in the office productivity software arena. They plan to not only offer free online applications that provide both word-processing as well as spreadsheet access, but also access to Sun’s OpenOffice from the Google Toolbar. More to come… (more…)

Mozilla resently released a new version of Firefox, their relatively new Web Standards compliant web browser. Despite the fact that it is only in the beta phase, it already shows a lot of promise!

New features include (Release Notes):

• Automated update

• Faster browser navigation
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs
• Improvements to popup blocking
• Clear Private Data
• Answers.com is added to the search engine list
• Improvements to product usability
• Better accessibility
• Report a broken Web site wizard
• Better support for Mac OS X (w00t!)

As you can see, there is not much by way of broken features despite the beta quality. The major problems come into play when you find that most of your Extensions don’t work anymore!! They are completely disabled and cannot be re-enabled. Overall, it feels much cleaner. I think it’s worth a try!

You can try this new version for yourself by clicking here. (more…)