Thinking of photoshopping or photochopping an image? You’d better start saying “I’m manipulating this image with Adobe® Photoshop® software.” according to Adobe’s Terms of Use – Proper use of the Photoshop trademark.
Trademarks are not verbs.
CORRECT: The image was enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.Trademarks are not nouns.
CORRECT: The image pokes fun at the Senator.
INCORRECT: The photoshop pokes fun at the Senator.
..oooo, its like a movie! Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress has announced the release Akismet (go the name!), a free WordPress remote spam filtering service. You enter your WordPress.com API key after installing the plugin on your own blog and away you go! Best of all, comments that are marked are held in the moderation queue for 15 days before being deleted (assuming you login to WP every once in a while.) Freaking awesome!
(Doh, I spelt the name wrong!)
A while ago I signed up for the Flock notification mailing list to beta test when this interesting product came along. Flock is yet another web browser, however with some exceptional and interesting features. Based on the Mozilla/Firefox XUL framework and Gecko engine the browser behaves just as you’d expect Firefox would with a few differences – as well as a new slick look. Of course, it is still in beta however I haven’t noticed any major issues.
del.icio.us integration, Flickr integration, a live search based on your history and favourites, built in blogging support via various APIs. This browser has everything I want! Minus a few things of course.
The built in del.icio.us integration allows you to easily share your favourites with the rest of the world via the del.icio.us service. Links can be tagged for your own personal use and tagged for the links on del.icio.us. Of course, this means your favourites are accessible from anywhere in the world – however you better make sure you are not ’staring’ (bookmarking and submitting) private and inappropriate material because if you’re using the del.icio.us integration, yes, it will appear on del.icio.us for everyone to see.
The built in Blog Editor uses the XMLRPC APIs and allows you to easily write directly to your blog. Of course, there are other more advanced tools out there which allow you to do this, however it is nice to have it integrated directly into the browser. The Blog Editor has support for a few formatting options (such as bold, italics, font sizes, lists, indents, links and images and also has support for saving posts as drafts, tagging the posts and another amazing feature, Flickr Integration!
The Flickr integration integration is not only limited to the Blog Editor. You can show a “Flickr” top bar in the web browser or the blog editor which will show you the latest images on your Flickr photostream. Once again, the magic drag and drop feature can be seen here with images being able to be dropped directly into the browser as a link, or directly into the Blog Editor as an actual image. Oh, something else i’ve just noticed when taking screen captures for this post – images from Flickr can be dragged and dropped directly into WYSIWYG editors in web pages.
If you’ve used Spotlight in Mac OSX you will have grown to love the search as you type feature. You can expect to see this in Flock as well. A few keystrokes into the search box and Flock is already buzy hunting down similar terms in your Favourites and History! The search box, of course, still doubles as the good old web search box.
Flock has another interesting feature, which would be the Shelf. Think of the Shelf as a bookshelf that you may have in your home a desk -except that you can drag links and images directly onto the shelf for use later – very handy if you’re like me and do a lot of clicking away on the internet and like to take note of certain things without bookmarking them. The beauty of the Shelf is that any shelf item can be dragged onto a page into a textbox or even into the Blog Editor (oh, did I also mention pictures actually show up in the Blog Editor when dragged across? Cool!)
Flock also brings an overhaul to the rather stock and boring look of the Firefox RSS formatting (ie, when you read an RSS feed directly in the browser). You can sort entries in the feed by date or source andcollapse certain sections/dates. Oh, you can also group sections of feeds together and syndicate them all in the one window – bye bye SharpReader!
Every browser needs to have bookmarks/favourites support – it’s an integral part of the web allowing you to bookmark certain sites for future reference as well as add them to different categories. However, with Flock you can actually tag your favourites with any relating terms – think of it as allowing you to group bookmarks together into various loose categories which do not have to be previously defined. You can then use the Favourites Manager (which is hugely improved on the stock Firefox manager) to view bookmarks via their tags or ‘collections’. When you’re submitting your favourites to del.icio.us, of course, the tags get submitted along too. When you add your bookmarks to the different
collections or create your own, you can also easily switch the collection shown
on the browser toolbar via a neat drop down menu.
Now, because Flock is based upon Firefox, you get the beautiful XUL engine which includes support for the powerful extention interface and themes interface that Firefox also has – so this should theoretically mean that extentions will need only minor changes (if any) to work in Flock, and themes will probably only require a few additional images. This shall hopefully help with the popularity of Flock with users being able to directly switch.
I’ve only covered a tad of what is actually in Flock as there are other exciting features such as lists of recently visited sites and most frequented sites you visit. These features may not suit everyone and may not be of use to everyone but however (I wasn’t going to mention this, but will now) as the web is progressing to and through the Web 2.0 (Oh how that word is now overused) blogging, social networking (del.icio.us), and photo sharing (Flickr) are all becoming vary popular and integrating all of this directly in the browser means that users will not have to go elsewhere or use additional programs.
If you haven’t already, I’d recommend visiting the Flock website, checking out what it is all about and downloading your own copy to play around with.
So I decided I would signup for the CSS Reboot on the 1st November. What’s going to be interesting is me sticking to a dealine and coming up with a new design. Closer to the Reboot you’ll be able to take a look at my reboot profile which will hopefully contain some notes and screenshots of what i’m working on.