I think I've seen that sign somewhere inside the McDonalds employee lounge ;-)
- Amir
Higlet, I have three, although they're on their last legs. I spent my monitor budget for the next five years on this 32" LCD, so I need to keep the CRT's for the second screen on this box, and for both screens on my spare box.
- Slippy "Threadsbane" Lane
AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category.
- Tim Hoeck
This site has both Desktop and Mobile alternatives to applications.
- Tim Hoeck
+1 Grasslands. Pure awesomeness. Nice job Kevin et al.
- Shannon Bauman
I love the clouds on Grasslands. It's too bad they disappear!! Nice job
- Marci Golub
The Orion theme is sweet, although the centering of the image makes it so that the most dynamic parts of it are hidden behind the actual feed. Maybe make the feed area background semi-transparent?
- Brian Chang
wow, this second batch of themes kicks ass
- chrisofspades
Kevin mentioned it to me the other day, but I don't remember now where he said he found it. When he is around again I'm sure he'll chime in.
- Rachel Lea Fox
Didn't know there were new themes.....have to check them out....like the looks of Grasslands.
- Bonnie Foster
The NASA Orion pic is a mosaic of several Hubble pictures. I found it via this blog post: http://www.bittbox.com/resourc... and got the actual source from Wikimedia from this page: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki... I could tell you how to spot the artifacts that show this to be a mosaic, but if I did, you'd always notice them and you would be sad.
- Kevin Fox
So Kevin, be honest... Have you inserted a Triforce into any of your themes?
- Travis Koger
from iPhone
I mighthave if I'd found out about it before Phillipp broke the story, but he did it right after we launched!
- Kevin Fox
Cool. Thanks Kevin for the background on the Orion pic.
- Joe....
Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, Firebug, Fission (status bar and loading indicator in location bar), Stop-or-Reload Button, Tamper Data, Xmarks... (and OS X only 1Password's add-on)
- Berk D. Demir
adblock, Tab Mix Plus (for the extra options), Fission (cool Safari/Mac stuff), All-in-One Gestures, SearchWP, Custom Download Manager (downloads are not supposed to open another window!), Jetpack (for the potential and the ad-blocking options), Hide Menubar (for the extra screen space).
- George Moga
Scott: Of course not, but it is the most popular, and .debs moreso.
- Tanath
Ahsan: You don't need to download everything. You simply add the repository to /etc/sources.list (which can be done via Software Sources from the Admin menu in Gnome, or in Synaptic) and then you can install whatever you like from that repo - in this case, chromium.
- Tanath
If you're not familiar with managing your repositories, you may want to look up a guide. You might also like Ubuntu Tweak, which has a sources.list editor, and can manage adding the Chromium repository for you (among others). You can find it here: http://ubuntu-tweak.com/downloa... (Still assuming you're running Ubuntu Linux).
- Tanath
Thanks, I'm comfortable with the command line. Perhaps I misunderstood the message on the repository page which said I had to download xx GB of packages.
- Ahsan Ali aka. Slick
from IM
Adblock is a must, i can handle without the rest...
- Dudu Bekel
Oh, LOL. That's how much space the repo is taking on the server. That was the actual repo URL. The actual line you should add would be: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromiu... jaunty main # Google Chromium
- Tanath
Today, Google engineers announced a technology called PubSubHubbub that makes RSS/Atom more real-time, and they deployed the technology on FeedBurner. FriendFeed also added support for the technology, so if you have a FeedBurner feed, your updates should show up in FriendFeed within seconds rather than minutes after the feed updates.
To enable it for your FeedBurner feed: go to Feedburner, click on the "Publicize" tab, and then click on "PingShot" and enable the PingShot service. That will enable PubSubHubbub and send your feed to a number of ping services.
- Bret Taylor
Once step closer to being able to build an open distributed twitter like system!
- Edwin Khodabakchian
this has been done already by superfeedr.com - google's behind the game on this one, but def takes it mainstream.
- Scott Magdalein
I don't understand. Updates won't appear on Feedburner in realtime, so what's the point?
- Peter
Peter: most blogging platforms ping Feedburner when you post a new entry, Feedburner pulls down the feed, Feedburner then pings the hub, then the hub notifies FriendFeed :)
- Benjamin Golub
Thanks Benjamin. Alas, my feeds are not that sophisticated.
- Peter
We're still working out kinks so if you have any issues please send me a message!
- Brett Slatkin
You lost me at "Today" I shall now just smile and nod politely
- Steve C
If I understand correctly this essentially turns any site with a feedburner feed into a real time publisher? But to read it in real time you need what?
- BryanSchuetz
Since this is a Google thingie, does it work on Google Reader already?
- Tarmo Aidantausta
FriendFeed can receive the pings *RIGHT NOW*
- Brett Slatkin
guys, how long are we really talking before it should appear here? Seconds or minutes?
- Zee.
The Reader integration is a prototype; more to come soon!
- Brett Slatkin
no way, so Google Reader could technically go real time??
- Zee.
is that SUP's role take up by those rss accelerator? or SUP is losing a chance to propagate in this field?
- huixing
Huixing: we plan to support all widely adopted real-time standards to make FriendFeed better. We are not tied to SUP only.
- Bret Taylor
from iPhone
Brett, why didn't you use the weblogs.com ping protocol? Your comment there about RSS, right up front, really captures the whole philosophy -- right? Let's just reinvent stuff that already works, so... Why? To break everything that already works? It won't happen that way. It'll only make your adoption curve steeper.
- Dave Winer
Is this working for anyone else? Anyone getting near real time publishing to Friendfeed with feedburner?
- Zee.
from iPhone
Would you ping me (dave dot winer at gmail dot com) when I can use RSS with this system. I'll be happy to evaluate it and provide feedback if necessary, and endorse it if it works. Thanks in advance.
- Dave Winer
Alright we've fixed in the spec Dave. Sorry for the mistake. Followed up.
- Brett Slatkin
I had enabled from way before, let's see if the post I'm about to publish works. I'll DM you Zee if it does!
- Jorge Escobar
can someone please let me know if they've managed to get this working?
- Zee.
There's also a WP plugin I wrote that does the same thing. This might be a good option for anyone who's not using feedburner. http://wordpress.org/extend...
- Josh Fraser
Zee, I set this up for my Empoprise-BI blog, wrote a blog post (using Blogger), and six minutes after posting I haven't seen anything in Google Reader or FriendFeed yet. So if you're not getting advertised response, you're not the only one. I'll test again at a later time.
- John E. Bredehoft
cool...just want to be sure it isn't me alone
- Zee.
Update - seven minutes after posting, the post showed up on FriendFeed (both in my feed, and in a group that receives the blog feed). Nothing in Google Reader yet.
- John E. Bredehoft
John: The Reader integration we demo'ed was a prototype; more to come in the future!
- Brett Slatkin
yeah, it seems 7 minutes is about how long its taking me for too (to arrive in friendfeed)
- Zee.
Could you DM me the feed URL? I'll look into the details and figure out the issue. Like I said before, we're still working out a few kinks (the FeedBurner integration is initial support right now). So thanks in advance for your help in making it super fast!
- Brett Slatkin
If you're looking for another implementation of PubSubHubbub, I'd suggest you give a look to our http://superfeedr.com ;) Thanks for your time and feedback!
- Julien
Heh, what's the idea behind the crazy name? ;)
- Tyson Key
does self hosted wordpress natively ping feedburner?
- Tyler Gillies
Nice to see XMPP more and more used on the web! It's a nice environment, also for cloud computing!
- Egon Willighagen
Nice tech, strange name though. Wonder if Google has a projectname generator, feeds it some foundation words, and then watches it spew out 1,835391 suggestions in 20-sized chunks? Too bad they didn't pick up PubSubBuzz instead, rhymes better. Also, what was EVER WRONG with PubSubHubris? (fresh and full of promise).
- ianf ⌘
This tech has been around for ages. It's getting much needed promotion right now, but it's not new. The name comes from XMPP's pubsub mechanism, with hubbub on the end. The option for PingShot has also been in Feedburner for months.
- Marlin Forbes
I think that unless you have installed the pubsubhubbub plugin for wordpress, that feedburner still polls your content. It pushes your content out to other interested parties using the new mechanism, but it will still poll your feed. Correct?
- Marlin Forbes
Setting up Discus was more complicated than it should have been on my site.. but they were VERY reachable thru twitter, and helped out quickly... however I'm still not 100% convinced they are the winning service moving forwards. JS-Kit looks excellent, Discus seemed to me to have a larger community.
- ASKJDOG
Congratulations Chris! Long time, no see. Happy to see these things things by JS-Kit!
- directeur
I prefer Scoble in America, he is more active ;)
- Mark
"Aw, I stepped in gum!... I think it was my own!"
- Rachel Lea Fox
It started with like one cape and suddenly almost everyone has capes! And only one girl? I think they didn't advertise enough, they could have had a lot of girls with bikinis!
- Rachel Lea Fox
"After weeks of negotiations, I.B.M. withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun’s board balked at a reduced offer, according to three people close to the talks. ... After the legal review, I.B.M. shaved its offer Saturday from $9.55 a share, the offer on the table late last week, to $9.40 a share, said one person familiar with the talks. The offer was presented to Sun’s board on Saturday, and it balked. The Sun board did not reject the offer outright, but wanted certain guarantees that the I.B.M. side considered “onerous,” according to that person."
- Paul Buchheit
from Bookmarklet
By my reckoning, IBM reduced its offer to Sun twice. You can't reduce an offer twice, and retain any credibility as a serious buyer. So IBM will have lost its credibility with Sun's Board - which includes Sun's largest shareholders. That means it's not Sun's management rejecting IBM - it's Sun's shareholders rejecting IBM. Either IBM did this because it didn't really want to do the deal; or IBM is not used to doing deals where it needs to behave in a credible way.
- Simon Brocklehurst
This sounds like what happened with the Apple deal in the '90s.
- Gabe
Simon - that was my thought. This price thing is more indicative of cold feet.
- Hutch Carpenter
Like for relevance. Dislike for content. I think the IBM deal would have been good for Sun, and kept its Java IP in reasonably competent hands. Plus, I hate navigating Sun's web pages; it's sad to say that IBM's are actually better :P
- Joel Webber
Sorry, Joel, but I can't think of any company that was really better off after being acquired by IBM. Rolm? Lotus? Rational? Informix? No on all counts.
- Gabe
@Gabe: Well, maybe you're right about that (I was an intern at Lotus during the IBM acquisition, and people were leaving like rats off a sinking ship). I'm thinking more of what's good for those of us who care what happens to Java. I know most of it's open in one way or another at this point, but it could still use good technical leadership, and I don't really see Sun doing that so much anymore.
- Joel Webber
+1 @Joel. And some of the alternatitives are pretty bad - Imagine Dell owning Sun. Hewlett Packard (or Cisco) have got no idea how to do software.
- Nick Lothian
I like it that IBM and Sun still remain as separate entities.
- Winston Teo
Joel, the problem is that IBM is not technically competent. That IBM people think SWT is a good idea demonstrates they don't even understand the problems, let alone have any ability to figure out high-quality solutions. People tend to confuse IBM's super strong sales and business development capability for it having strong technical ability. IBM's business model is such that the weaker its staff are technically, and the worse its software, the more money it makes. Clever stuff, business-wise.
- Simon Brocklehurst
@Simon - does Sun have alternatives? (Also - it's not like Swing or JavaFX give me huge confidence in Sun sometimes...)
- Nick Lothian
Nick, there's always a "Plan B". In the event of no buyers, Sun can do massive layoffs to return to profitability. If Sun cut enough to have $1B in annual profits, market cap would be higher than IBM's offer, which would provide a better exit for major shareholders. More than possible to do this, given Sun's annual R&D budget is $2B. Re: JavaFX - it's at least modern in concept; SWT is a flawed idea, that was known to be flawed (by everyone except IBM) more than a decade ago.
- Simon Brocklehurst
@Simon - there are other things Sun could do to make a short term return to profits, too eg, try and moneterise Java more aggressively,drop the software business and become a patent troll, etc, etc. I'm not sure any would be good for Java.
- Nick Lothian
@NIck - well, several parts of Sun's software business, including Java, are profitable currently. No need to drop these if they look like staying profitable. The trick is to cut the overhead (under-performing middle managers, sales people that can't sell etc.); and cut the R&D to a size that reflects the size of the business today. I'm not sure growing the top-line in the short-term is realistic in the current economy. A return to profitability, though, should be possible.
- Simon Brocklehurst
when you pull the piece of gum out of the pack it snaps on your fingers like the gum trick.
- rob friedman
from twhirl
@Simon: I really don't want to turn this into an SWT/Swing argument, as I feel like they both suck for various reasons. But I don't think it's fair to say that SWT is proof that IBM lacks technical competence (From my limited experience, IBM's technical competence varies a lot among different groups within the company).
- Joel Webber
With SWT, they wanted to solve a specific problem very well from an end-user's perspective -- i.e. it should feel like a native app, and be fast. And they did so quite well, IMHO, even though it sucks to have to use all those native libraries and platform-specific jars. But the Eclipse UI still feels a lot better to me than IntelliJ, and I think SWT's the reason (obviously this is a matter of opinion, but I know plenty of people who far prefer a SWT UI, so it's at least open to debate).
- Joel Webber
@Joel, you're right - it doesn't prove it; rather I think it illustrates it And clearly, it would be overstating things to say the *whole* of IBM is technically incompetent. However, there are *many*, *many* weak people there. Everyone I meet that has dealt with IBM - customers, collaborators, competitors - has stories to tell; and almost none are positive in terms of technical capability. Conversely, everyone is impressed by its ability to win business and put dollars in the bank.
- Simon Brocklehurst
There's a restaurant here that sells a garden salad for $4.75. If you want chicken on it, that's $3 extra for 3 thin strips of chicken. BUT You can buy a chicken salad (the garden salad with 6 strips of chicken) for $5.50.
- Anika
It's probably deliberate that they're de-emphasizing the application. That megatoolbar looks ugly and jarring, but you can see what they're trying to do, right? Okay, "Translate / Translate", "Zoom / Zoom", and "Send to OneNote / OneNote" are just silly, but I bet that can be fixed. The idea of having actions categorized, with a few popular actions promoted out of each category, doesn't seem like a totally unreasonable approach to managing toolbar/menu complexity.
- ⓞnor
yeah, i'm sorry but that just looks awful. does. not. keep. it. simple.
- MG Siegler
To be sure, the "Actions" category is lame -- isn't everything here an "action"? (Certainly "delete" and "reply" seem like actions to me.) In fact their whole categorization scheme is rather suspect -- "OneNote" is a category, really? Isn't that an app? But somewhere under there is a designer trying hard to make sense of an incredibly complex set of features. At a guess, they've built a pluggable system so that functionality can actually float around from app to app but retain some coherence.
- ⓞnor
But at a higher level, the whole thing feels like rearranging deck chairs. The whole model of applications with a document view and a vast menu of commands that operate on the document feels old and strained, compared to a more web-type UI where the affordances are integrated directly into the view.
- ⓞnor
Only 25% of the window is devoted the most important content. I looks like a ****ing mess to me. The vast majority of the visible buttons will not be used by most users.
- Paul Grav
Did anybody notice voice to text conversion of voicemail? That is super cool! Now, voicemails can be indexed too!
- Jigar Mehta
I'm pretty happy with the voicemail-to-trash conversion of my current system though.
- Jim Norris
I find it disgustingly ugly, but personal taste is rarely a good measure of usability. One thing, though. What about people who don't like clicking, but instead use chains of alt->something->something for commonly used commands? I kind of missed Office 2007 completely - is that option still around?
- Goran Zec
Wow. It looks like someone forgot to include a CSS file or something. Yes, there's a lot of functionality, but it's exacerbated by what I can only describe as a lack of design..
- Jonathan Terleski
Yikes, that's butt ugly. I'm not sure I'd have any idea where to start to get anything done. Somehow I don't think my mom will either.
- Joel Webber
I like the "voicemail-to-trash" conversion feature :) Also, will Google Voice + Gmail deliver all those features?
- Jérôme Flipo
I imagine that everyone on the Google Docs team is secretly rooting for this particular product manager's vision of Office 2010 to come to fruition. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
- DeWitt Clinton
This is a caricature of an actual application. It tugs hard at my uncanny valley receptors.
- moo. bye.
This hurts my eyes. Can't they add another 100 buttons/controls/widgets? Surely there's something else buried in nested menus just begging to come out and play
- John Koetsier
The Ribbon in 2007 is stunning. I trust them to get it right with Outlook.
- Jamie
On the bright side, even though there is realively little space left for the actual content compared to the 2003 (pre-ribbon) version, they didn't take about 60% of the screen width and fill it with grey "whitespace" like... oh, nm.
- Jim Espinoza
A salutory lesson in how to make a crap product even crapper. Why does anyone bother. 2007 was just astounding for its awfulness, now the MS PR is trying to make us believe they surveyed customers for feedback. I want to find the person they 'surveyed' and give them a good talking to.
- David Eedle
I'm just getting used to Office 2007 :-/
- Amit Morson
You have to understand these poor guys at Microsoft: it's getting a lot harder to slow our new laptops down to a crawl.
- saccades
We're still on 2003 here and I don't particularly like that, but this seems like some sort of unfinished web interface. That ribbon thingy uip there seems like a waste of space.
- Johan Mellberg
from twhirl
I really think the interface is somehow broken. The ribbon was OK in 2007. This screen has 0 interface improvements.
- Andy Gongea
Do you suppose the 'softies put any effort into improving Outlook's pathetic support for IMAP? Or did they focus exclusively on pointless eye candy?
- Pat Rice
So glad I have not had to use Outlook in years. This preview reminds me of how bad the interface design was and they have only added more brightly colored icons and options for 2010. Feature bloat?
- Jackson
Voicemail will only be part of MS Office how many years after the prevalence of VOIP?
- coldbrew
Microsoft, as much as I dislike many of their products, is well-funded and has a team of very skilled user interface testers and designers. There's no way something like this could come out of there. Thus, I conclude that these are either forgeries designed to look bad, or one of the designer's children got hold of a template library and these got accidentally released.
- Glen Campbell
OTOH, OOo's interface is also rather awful, but in a different way.
- 9000
Every day I am teased by the Microsoft FTE's who get access to the dogfood versions.
- Sean Oliver
Experiments are good. Giving users access to try them is even better. I do not however want to try new anti-lock braking code for my car. But if your product won't kill people, you should be experimenting.
- Ryan Hickman
FTA: "It’ll be interesting to see if these latest changes will turn Blog Search into the news-bringing powerhouse it could be. It’s also important to note that Google’s focus on delivering results very fast shows they’re taking the Twitter real-time search threat very seriously."
- LANjackal
from Bookmarklet
@LANjackal: you are probably right on with that :) the resources available through Blogs nowadays are far more reliable, informative and instantaniously current - thanks for the share :)
- Aline Ohannessian
@Aline: That's actually a quote from the article. But you're welcome nonetheless. I've edited my comment to make that obvious though
- LANjackal
I hope so. So far the accuracy has been terrible
- Bwana ☠